


A slender volume of poetry

by starcunning



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Adult Content, All Dialogue, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Blue Radiance, Breakup, Breathplay, Cid is mentioned, Constrained Fiction, Drug Use, F/F, F/M, Faerie tale style AU, Fray lives AU, Fray lives and Sid dies, Garlean Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Garlean headcanons, Gen, Haurchefant Greystone Angst, Imperial AU, Infidelity, M/M, Nonbinary Character, Omega raid quests, Other, Past Haurchefant Greystone/Warrior of Light, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Reincarnation Romance, Roleswap, Rowena's House of Splendors, Shadowbringers Spoilers, Shasi sas Intemperatus, Sibling Relationship, Sidurgu and Rielle are mentioned, Some Fray/Sid/WOL in the background, This Beast that Rends Me, Time Travel Fix-It, Tumblr: FFXIVwrite2019, Viera headcanons, Weight criticism, and didn't know what to do with, and were like 'what's up fellow runaway', blue mage - Freeform, but no THANCRED? that surprised me, fatphobia, hey remember in d&d 2e when healing spells were necromancy, i don't really know how to express it; it's kind of mild but could be triggering, i feel much less sure writing sid than fray, i love to think about who the WOL was in the time of Amaurot, it was a fun thought experiment if nothing else, it's becoming quite obvious where my biases lie huh?, it's very good, lensha is so obstinate, more like time travel break it worse but that would require me to get into this AU much deeper, my love and light, narcissistic mothers, nonbunary if you will, odette please use your brain, odette remains a disaster, recognized him immediately, self-sabotage, she belongs to user seraphicrose, sometimes a legacy wol and a current wol hold hands, thank u ishikawa for my life and also for giving new purpose to an OC i had for years, the origins of that 'Kilntreader' epithet, the text absolutely will not bear these out but Aris's village was different i guess, the twins have a Type, they probably met Carvallain in 1.0, things are a bit weird in shasiverse, things yet to come to pass, to be honest a lot of that is because john crow localized them into being Basically The Same Guy, what does it even MEAN to be the warrior of light anyway, when in japanese and german that's definitely not the case, yes; this DOES mean that Shasi was married to the ancient incarnation of the Dzemael twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-10-05 11:54:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 31
Words: 31,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starcunning/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: Prompt fills for the FFXIVWrite challenge on tumblr.All titles are drawn from works by poets I associate with the characters in each story.Update 1 October 2019: This collection is now complete and indexed (see chapter 31).





	1. My heart, being hungry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #1: Voracious**  
X'shasi Kilntreader.  
[[Title](http://everydaymillay.blogspot.com/2011/04/my-heart-being-hungry-feeds-on-food-fat.html)]
> 
> Gen.

It seemed suspicious.  


It also didn’t seem like her business, exactly, but X’shasi had never met a problem she wasn’t interested in solving, so somehow she found herself acting the Yellowjackets’ cats-paw. There was a part of her that imagined she was far too public a figure for that to work—at least anywhere in Eorzea—but if the man had been abroad in the New World, as he’d claimed, then he’d have little reason to have heard of her. So if he recognized her, he was a huckster.

There was little sign of that. She’d gotten good at reading people, even without her preternatural sense about the whole thing. If he’d noticed her at all there had been no glint of recognition, no hesitation, no lingering gaze.

He was consumed instead by his passion for spellcraft—the legendary blue magic. Something tickled in the back of Shasi’s brain; something familiar. She’d heard of blue magic before, hadn’t she? But nothing about this explanation rang true to whatever it was that was bothering her.

Then again, perhaps it wasn’t the magic at all. The alleged mage—and suspected fraudster—was a midlander man and of little interest. His assistant, however … _there_ was someone interesting. He had the same silver-blonde hair and pale blue eyes as her sometime-mentor X’rhun—and half her tribesmen besides.

It was for him that she stayed after the demonstration after its interruption by a pair of Mamool Ja. Their timing was too perfect, their attacks too coordinated. It felt staged, like most of this interaction. The only thing that felt real was the other miqo’te and the possibility of some connection to him.

“I do have to congratulate you on your choreography,” Shasi said.  
The mage—for he was certainly that; it was only _what kind_ that she questioned—smiled nervously. “I really don’t know what you mean,” he said. His gloved hand tightened on the head of his cane, and Shasi found her gaze drawn to it. The finial was like a wolf’s head, carved of bone. That would be the ideal sort of tool for a thaumaturge, she knew; she’d seen enough of them about their work back in Ul’dah, of course.  
Her gaze snapped upward again. “Soul crystals are supposed to be priceless,” she said. “I’ve seen few enough in my life. Yet here you are, handing them out for a fistful of gil? Are they glass or simply hard candy?”  
“Neither,” replied a new voice. X’shasi turned her head toward its source and found the miqo’te man from earlier, dusting down his crimson bliaud. “Why don’t you get everything together, Martyn,” he suggested; “and let me talk to her.”  
“Ah,” she said, “the accomplice. You seem an odd sort for a ‘blue mage.’”  
He laughed. “How is that?”  
“You’re not even wearing blue,” she pointed out, gesturing to his rust-red garb. It made him resemble X’rhun all the more.  
“Really,” he said. Laughter sparkled in his tone. “Because I had heard you were a _red_ mage, and you hardly look the part.”  
“You know me?”  
“You’re X’shasi,” he said. “Shakkal’s child.” Not the Warrior of Light; not the Champion of Eorzea. Her mother’s daughter.  
She closed her eyes a moment. “So you _are_ Lynx tribe,” she said. “You must be from the Gyr Abanian sect too?”  
Whatever amusement had danced upon his face a few moments before faded. “Once,” he said.

“Someone tipped him off,” Shasi said. “And he hired you.” It seemed easier to believe than the thought of an unexpected relative.  
The miqo’te closed his eyes. “No,” he said. “I’m X’moru, and I’m a blue mage. I’m here of my own volition, because I believe in the work.”  
Shasi tilted her head. “Does it really happen how he says?” she wondered. “You can observe an enemy’s aetherial manipulations and replicate them?”  
X’moru nodded. “It’s not hard, once you know what to look for.”  
“I thought,” she said, some half-remembered story coming back to her, “blue mages were supposed to _eat_ their foes.”  
The laughter that came in response cracked like a gunshot. There was no amusement in it, only a tired sort of exasperation. “What, like you were ready to eat the soul crystal?” He shook his head. “That’s a damaging myth meant to sow fear about the people of the New World that practiced this magic. Who told you that? Khilo? It sounds like him.”  
Shasi tried to stifle her annoyance. She flicked an ear anyway. “It seems like you know my parents better than I do,” she said. “Were you a Crimson Duelist too?”  
“Shakkal was my friend and Rhun is my brother, but no.”  
She wanted to know him, then—he who had known her mother; he who was kin to her mentor. _If_ he was that. She wanted him to be. “He never mentioned you.”  
X’moru just stared into her face a long moment. The intensity of his bright blue eyes was unnerving. “I think there’s a lot he maybe hasn’t mentioned to you,” he said eventually. Then, breaking into a genial smile once more, he said, “So do you want a proper demonstration, or what?”  
Less curious about blue magic, and more about this unexpected tribesman, Shasi found herself nodding anyway.


	2. With greater wit, or better, wealth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #2: Bargain**  
Caelina Valeria & Nero tol Scaeva.  
[[Title](https://books.google.com/books?id=sGo4AAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA130&pg=PA125#v=onepage&q&f=false)]
> 
> Gen.

The smell of antiseptic pervaded, but its sharpness was preferable to the taste of dust on the air outside. Rain was coming soon, the Ala Mhigans had promised, over and over, but “soon” never quite became “now,” and the flat-packed earth of Rhalgr’s Reach had grown dry, the scrub that grew along the reservoir thinning to brittleness with surprising rapidity.

At least the field hospital was clean, and Caelina did her best to keep it so, pausing on the mat beside the door to knock the toes of her boots against the floor. There were some wounded, but fewer every day; the Twelfth had all but fled in the months after Ala Mhigo had been reclaimed. With no tyrant prince to hold sway by immensities of fear, there had been little reason to stand and fight. Caelina did not expect they had surrendered their gunblades entirely, but for the moment it was enough to see the infirmary stand all but empty.

That made its few patients more obvious, and she could not help but frown at its far corner, where Nero Scaeva sat ensconced amongst piles of tomestones.  
“Really?” she greeted him. “Weren’t you ordered to bed rest?”  
He didn’t even have the good grace to look sheepish. “I am in bed,” he pointed out, sweeping an illustrative hand over the blanket that covered him to the waist. He had always been slender, but in the greying linen gown he wore, he looked rail-thin, and sallow besides. There were shadows beneath his eyes.  
“But not resting,” she said. She crossed to the nearest chair and scooped up a ream of notes.  
“Put that anywhere,” Nero told her, waving a careless hand.  
She glanced down at them. “The House of Splendors?” she said, squinting. “Nero.”

Setting the stack of paper aside atop a crate—full of more tomestones, she didn’t doubt—she dropped into the now-empty chair, regarding him. Whatever admonition she’d made of his name had not quite cowed him, but he did not look up to meet her gaze.

“Are you sleeping?” she asked.  
“I think you would notice,” he said, reaching out to take up one of the tomestones. “I’m very wide awake, I assure you.”  
Caelina sighed. “Nero,” she said again. “I have a right to be worried.”  
“I think the time for that is passed,” he said. He looked over at her, flashing a sardonic smile: “After all, the worst has already happened! I’m very safe here, I’m told, and meanwhile you—and Garlond—get to go on in the Rift without me while I do busywork.”  
“For Rowena. Is she even paying you in coin?”  
He huffed. “I’m not an idiot.” Nero passed the tomestone he held from one hand to the other, and laid it atop a precarious tower that stretched from the floor to just above the mattress. “You can’t exactly pay rent in scrip.”  
“Well, not unless you want to rent from her, which might be the only thing worse than working for her. Do the Ironworks not pay well enough?” Caelina chewed on the inside of her lip. It was funny how the more coin she had the less she seemed to need—a famous name was enough to trade on in a great many places, and if she scrupled to try it, well, Tataru never did. Still, if she were so direct as to hand him a sack of gil, she couldn’t imagine he’d take it. He had his pride—and little else, when it came to it, and she could hardly call herself his friend if she stripped him of it.  
He rubbed at the side of his face. She could hear the stubble of his cheek rasp against his palm. “Some of us have bills to pay, you know,” he said.  
It stung—perhaps because she’d had the same thought and resolved to no answer. “I could talk to Garlond about it.”  
“Don’t bother,” Nero said. “It’s Jaye that handles the books, and there’s not much to be done while I’m furloughed.”  
“In the line of duty?” she asked.  
“I’m getting a stipend,” he said. The words were practically a hiss, and quiet as they were they seemed loud in the empty room. “It’s more than fair, I just need to supplement it with other work.”

Caelina ducked her head, cowed. There were a few things she wanted to say: that he deserved better than some dingy Mor Dhona flat; that she wanted to help; that it probably wasn’t healthy to slip his carers’ notice and make the short hike to stare across the Gyr Abanian flats at the distant silhouette of Baelsar’s Wall—and not simply because of his injuries.

She wanted to apologize, too, but not being quite able to settle on the question of “for what,” she elected to take a different tack—and one he might respond to better. Caelina cast her gaze about the room in exaggerated fashion. “It’s just you, working on this?” she asked.  
“Yes,” Nero said.  
“No wonder Cid’s not here,” she said. His expression compressed into a pout, but before he could protest, she continued: “I can’t imagine he has too many bills to pay, living rent-free in your head these twenty years.” That merited a weak chuckle. It only blossomed into a real smile when she caught his eye, reached for a tomestone, and asked, “So what are _we_ doing?”


	3. Why should you worship her? Her you surpass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #3: Lost**  
Emet-Selch & WOL / Emet-Selch/WOL  
[[Title](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hero_and_Leander_\(Marlowe\)/First_Sestiad)]
> 
> Gen, or M/X, depending on your preferences.   
Canon-divergent AU.

There was a city once—a jewel amongst jewels, every facet gleaming. It was made lovely by order and shone with promise, and though all the cities of the world were beautiful, this one, at the world’s heart, was fairer still.

It had a name, of course, though none used it in those times. After all, what other city could you mean?

Men lived in peace in those days—in the days before need, before suffering, they were happy. They spent their time exploring the potential of ideas—giving them form or voice, exchanging concepts freely that all might benefit from wisdom and discovery. There was disagreement, of course; only from differentiation could new growth come forth. But even those that disagreed with one another enjoyed a mutual respect—for even in that ageless time where time meant nothing, who had a moment to waste on disdain?

At the heart of the city at the heart of the world there were ten and four luminaries, and it was they who were responsible for guiding the people. They were shepherds of the city, and of the world, and of the very star upon which they dwelt. Their offices were not hereditary, nor granted at a whim like some tyrant parcels out scraps of power to legitimize the retention of his own rule. Instead their appointments were a recognition of certain talents, granted to those who were most capable with the arts of creation, that their wills might be yoked to the purpose of serving their people. It was a pleasure and an honor to serve, and their servitude did not go unrecognized. Such was the esteem they were held in that soon the titles of their office served to identify them better than their names.

They were called the Convocation of Fourteen, as only befitted their number and their purpose.

Though there was no higher calling than to serve on that illustrious council, those so appointed did not usually stay for life. They offered up the best of themselves and their talents, and then when the time came would cede the office to another best equipped for the strictures of its duties. There was sorrow in this, but more than that there was joy, for all knew that the council member that was leaving them had done their utmost, and the one they would appoint in their place would honor that legacy even as they brought a fresh perspective. But always there were fourteen, and always did they meet as equals.

When the Emissary returned from the cities across the sea with dire news, the city spoke of nothing else. There were those who felt aid must be sent—but the people of the world were the same in all the world, and there were few tools to be granted that they did not already have. Horrors begat horrors, and men learned to fear. Fear begat pain, and men learned to suffer. It was whispered that beneath the earth were hells full of beasts and violence and that this was the source of the trouble, while the sky could only look on in sorrow.

Hells opened; heavens wept. The Convocation debated. What else could we do?

This was not the way of the world—the laws of the star should not have permitted this, but there was little to be gained by staring death in the face and declaring it an impossibility. The city was safe, but it would not always be so.

A multitude of plans were put forth. In the end, it was Lahabrea’s support that decided matters—a master of creation and a skilled orator besides, it was he that urged us to create an entity capable of enforcing the strictures of reality. For all we had created and all we had built, we had never conceived of anything greater than ourselves. We had seen no need. But Lahabrea’s impassioned speeches and meticulous concepts inculcated the idea, and soon we came to quorum: we would pool our powers with those of the people and give voice to creation itself. We would create a Keeper of Precepts, who, when he spoke to Death, would make it listen. On this we were nearly all agreed. Nearly, I say, for as news of beasts and horrors crept into the city, nearer with each passing day, there was one who yet protested. So strident were their convictions that they announced that, should we put this plan into action, they would abdicate their office.

It was unthinkable. None of the Convocation had ever left with matters unsettled; with work undone. Certainly none had vacated their duties while a crisis loomed. We pled—_I_ pled—with them to stay, and they pled with me to reconsider. But they had no plan so complete as Lahabrea’s. Had they, I would have thrown the weight of my support behind it.

Then Doom came to the city.

We were not ready for it. How could we ever be ready for it? We were not agreed; we were not prepared. In purpose and action were we resolved, however, and the fourteen of us went forth in defense of the city we loved. But we, who had never conceived of anything greater than ourselves, found ourselves outmatched. Fire rained from the skies, and the gleaming streets became abattoirs of blood and ash. Those we could save, we saved; those we could shelter, we sheltered. But even when the beasts laid still and our beloved city was a charnel ruin, we knew no peace. We had gone out fourteen, and come back thirteen.

Thus, before the world was sundered, we were broken.

There was no time to find a replacement. They had made no suggestions on the subject—they had intended to leave their office vacant, and though we did not wish it, we ceded to that demand out of need. The sun blazed over the land, scorching earth and burning seas. Discord rang throughout the city. Time was not with us. We had but one plan—the one my friend had rejected.

You know what happens next, of course. Your Mother will have told you.

Has She told you what it cost us? Perhaps She thinks that because we did not pay with our own lives, we counted our salvation cheap. We were the architects of this plan, but we were not its agents—we had to live, to see the work done. We had the ability, and the cost to us was to demand the lives of those we served—and to survive them; to know them as lost to us as all those that the Doom had claimed.

Thus it was that we created Zodiark, and thus it was we became His servants. He did all that we asked of Him—he rewrote the laws of the star itself to save those that still dwelt in it. He could not undo the damage already wrought; not how we had made Him. But the denizens of our dying world came forth unto us and offered themselves up to restore the grass upon the earth; the fish of the seas; the breeze in the air. It was perverse; it was contradictory to the order of things we had clung to all our lives. But the precepts had changed, in their keeping, and we accepted. But it was not right. It was not just. Suffering was ash and blood in our mouths, and we developed no taste for it. I do not recall who it was who proposed the third plan. Perhaps it was Fandaniel, wracked with guilt over her failure to protect her people. Perhaps it was Deudalaphon, who had loved the city more than his own life. Whatever the case, we all knew it was not meet that we should live without those who died in our place. When the star came into its full again, we decided, we would offer up a portion of the life upon it. In return, Zodiark would restore to us all those we had lost. I would be glad to see my friend again, and they would see that we had done the right thing—that we had saved the star, and the people, and them.

There were those who did not agree with me. Not about the plan, and not about my friend. They rallied to their name—not their title but their very name—and opposed us. It was what my friend would want, these people claimed. It was the first time in years that anyone but myself had spoken that name. They called them Hero.

It was the first time we had ever fought in such a way. They would not give way to our plans; they would not give the future over to this star to those who had once been its shepherds. Were they any better than us? We have been called peddlers of chaos, but one must have chaos in his heart to give birth to a dancing star.

Them as much as us. Your Mother was their creation, did you know? She was born after Zodiark to contain Him, and though He should have prevailed, She was created with one purpose and thereby was granted the power to enervate Him. Her blinding light reigned over the star, and the conflict between what should be and what must be splintered reality itself.

The world, and every life on it, fractured, and its pieces were set adrift.

The sundering of the star was not gentle; beyond those who gave their lives for Hydaelyn, countless more died. Ten of our number were among them, and we three that yet lived despaired. Zodiark, in His weakened state, could not undo what had been wrought in Hero’s name—a final Doom that they would never have wanted.

We held onto hope that some scrap of our colleagues’ souls had survived. Perhaps on some dim reflection …

And so we went in search, to find them and restore them to their office. It was a lonely time, when there were but three of us and fourteen worlds between, the lights of mens’ lives on each dim and fading. I was alone. I was impatient. The star would need to be made whole first, and then we would have to tend it with the selfsame care that absent Halmarult had once tended his gardens. For the first time I knew need—and I did what we had always done when faced with a need. I created something to meet it. Perhaps none could have done it but me; with all my art and half my soul I gave myself the one thing Zodiark could not grant me.

I gave myself my friend back.

That the cost was half of me is only meet. Half of me had been missing in any case, and at least this sacrifice was mine to make. I kept it from the others—though perhaps they knew, when I returned with you walking at my side, remembering nothing.

You never do remember.

Not until you do. Not until it destroys you. But the work is half done now, and with every quake and every flood and every falling star I exult, because the hand of the infernal clock ticks backward. Because among these shattered shards there awaits a world made whole. An I made whole. A you made whole.

We have done this half a dozen times, Hero. Must we do it a half-dozen more? I have told you all—I swear upon the duties of my office, which have always been to speak the truth. Do you understand now? Do you remember?

Will you survive?

I am waiting, Hero.


	4. And to knock at my heart is to beat on my grave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #4: Shifting Blame**  
Odette de Dzemael/Fray Myste.  
[[Title](http://www.poemswithoutfrontiers.org/Les_Separes.html)]

The scent of smoke still hung in the air. It had been weeks since the last fire had been extinguished, and the True Brothers of the Faith had been forced to give up their hostages, but the aftermath remained. If Odette walked to the end of the street and stood in the little garden, she was sure she could look down and see it—the black smudge in the Brume where the row houses had once stood. It was not nearly distant enough in her memory for her to be wholly comfortable with it.

The house she stood outside was modest by Ishgardian standards—and certainly by hers, being used to the grandness of the manor. It had belonged to one of the clergy before Odette had bought it. The man had spent his life in the Vault, trying to keep her from the Archbishop. Odette was not sorry he was dead. He had no family to speak of, and the house had stood empty until she had gone to the Vault a second time.

It was not so now.

Their belongings had always been meager, and much had been lost in the fire, but Fray and Sidurgu had found some furniture, at least, and curtains for Rielle’s windows, and a log for the hearth. There was a scattering of books over the kitchen table—as likely Fray’s as Rielle’s, and either of them before Sid, if Odette knew them at all. And she had come to, in the year since she had met them—first Fray and then the others. It was not merely the crackling of flame that made the home seem cozy; Dzemael Manor had a hundred fireplaces and no warmth.

Fray came in from the kitchen, and looked surprised to see her standing there, in the little room. “I didn’t know you were coming,” he said.  
“I was in the neighborhood,” Odette replied. “Actually, I was going down to the Crozier, so I wanted to check and see if there’s anything you still needed.”  
Fray turned his face away, his gaze sliding from her silk habit to the daub walls. “We’re fine,” he said.  
“Rielle has clothes enough?”  
“She’s fine,” he insisted. “Sid thinks …”  
Odette let that pause hang between them a little while until it became clear that Fray wasn’t going to tell her what Sidurgu thought. “Where is he, anyway?” she wondered. “Either of them.”  
“Out,” Fray said. “They’ll be back for dinner.”

Odette nodded, as though this satisfied whatever unease gnawed at her heart. The walls were too close around her, and Fray was strange, out of his armor—for all that she had seen him in greater dishabille before. Perhaps it was merely that he was out of his context, as she was out of hers, being far more suited to grand halls of cold stone. Camp Dragonhead had been like this, too, and Grandpère’s study, before he had abdicated and adjourned himself to the Churning Mists.

“What does Sidurgu think?” she said at last.  
Fray lifted his golden eyes to hers once more. “It’s not important.”  
“Then tell me, and I’ll think no more on it.”  
He answered her with a sigh, waving her to follow as he retreated to the kitchen. She went, shrinking from the cooking-fire as Fray prodded at it. “We’re fine,” Fray said. “We’re settling in_ fine._ Sid thinks your money would be better spent elsewhere.”  
Odette reached out to brush his hair back from his dark skin. “What does he think I should be doing?”  
Fray shook his head, and when he straightened he reached for her hand. He stopped just short, seeing the white gloves she wore, and shoved his hands into his pockets like a sulky schoolboy. “_We’re_ fine,” he said for what felt like the thousandth time. It landed differently, though. “And I can hardly blame you for only addressing the problem that’s in front of you. He and I, we aren’t much better. Sid thinks it would be pretty hard for you to buy a house for everyone who lost theirs in the fires.”  
Odette nodded. “My allowance is not _that_ generous,” she agreed.  
“And he feels awkward,” Fray added. The way he glanced back at the cookpot told her that perhaps Fray was feeling awkward about her largesse himself.  
“Why?” she laughed. “I had the money; I can do what I please with it.”  
“I know,” he said.  
Odette tilted her head: “He didn’t seem to have such a problem when I was using my resources to deal with the Countess de Caulignont,” she noted.  
Fray shrugged. “It’s different,” he said, turning away and opening all the cupboards until he found the bowls. “Are you staying?” he asked, glancing back at her.  
“For dinner? I can’t,” she said.  
“Not for dinner,” he said after a moment, suddenly very interested in arraying the bowls before him.

Despite the heat of the kitchen, she felt very cold. It was as though the Coerthan winds had cut through the very heart of her—as though the Echo had shown her what was to happen in the coming moments just a moment too late to stop it.  
“Rielle likes you,” he said, breaking apart a loaf of bread with those broad, scarred hands. “And Sid won’t say so, but … well, he tolerates you about as well as he tolerates me.”  
Odette swallowed. It was no use. Her throat was dry. “What’s your point?” she asked. Her instinct was to pray to Halone, but there was a part of her that thought to call out to her opposite number instead—as though Menphina could rectify this feeling that seized upon her.  
“I think perhaps Sid wouldn’t feel half so awkward about you supporting this household if you were part of it. You’re good for us.”  
“I’m the Warrior of Light!” Her voice cracked on the last syllable.  
He turned to face her then. “I know,” he said. “So you won’t stay here all the time. I’m fine with that. But there’s always a log on the fire—”  
“I _have_ a home, Fray,” she interrupted. How had it come to this point, that she should have to say such things? She hated the shrillness of her voice, the obvious panic of it. It must have been showing on her face—that wouldn’t do. What could she be instead? Angry? Derisive? “Remember? It’s in the Pillars.”  
“Odette,” he said.  
She rode roughshod over his interruption, laughter lurching from her throat. “It’s been in the family for years! The _Dzemael_ family!”  
However funny she was forcing herself to find this whole situation, Fray remained composed. “But you’re not like them,” he said slowly.

Wasn’t she? Why wasn’t that enough? The kitchen was far too warm, the walls far too close. Fray’s eyes were much too immediate. But she could not look away from him. “Are you so sure?” she asked, quietly vehement, and at least she had the pride of getting her voice back under her control. “How did we meet, Fray?”  
“That doesn’t matter,” he said.  
“How did we _meet,_ Fray?!”  
“In the arena,” he replied.  
“I was trying to kill you!” Her eyes were hot. That was an impossibility; that she would not bear. She lifted her chin instead, and looked down her nose at him. “And then I ran and told all your troubles to the Lord-Commander.” Perhaps that reminder would convince him to put her back out into the cold.  
Instead he only shook his head. “Because you thought he would be able to help, and he did,” Fray said. “Odette.”

There was such tenderness in his voice as could not be borne. She recoiled from it, stepping backwards out of the kitchen with such haste she feared she might stumble, but half a lifetime at balls stood her in good stead enough to be graceful. She could be composed; she could hide the cold fear that dwelt in her, she could … she could …

She could make him hate her.

“He only listened to me,” Odette said, “because I was fucking him.”  
Fray said nothing then. His face was an unreadable mask; he might as well have been wearing that adamantine helmet of his for all she could read of him. He was far, far better at this than her.  
She shuddered—or perhaps it was laughter that shook her shoulders. “Oh, come now,” she said, remembering every lecture her mother had ever given her about a lady’s diction. “You _can’t_ be surprised.” She was so close to the door then; she could make good her escape, so long as he put the blame for her deficiencies right where it belonged. “I am exactly like them,” she said, in the loftiest tone she could manage. “And you want nothing to do with me.”  
“Get out,” Fray said, and it was only then she knew she had accomplished her aims.


	5. A Fear that in the deep night starts awake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #5: Vault**  
X'shasi Kilntreader/Baro Llyonesse. Past X'shasi Kilntreader/Haurchefant Greystone.  
[[Title](https://www.bartleby.com/131/2.html)]
> 
> F/M.

The ember of last night’s fire paints the little room in red and gold. When she wakes it’s all at once, and the room looks so much like her dream she doesn’t know where she is for a moment.

It’s her house. It’s her bed. But it might be somewhere else. It might be a hallowed hall of white and gold, brilliant beneath the setting sun and no warmer for it. She can smell ash or maybe blood, she can taste salt. Sweat or tears? Ash or blood? Thanalan or Coerthas?

She bites back the scream that wells at her throat and hates herself.

She had made her peace with this, she had thought. It had been hard won—moons of effort after years of pain. The pursuit of it had stained her from red to black, had hardened her armor, had lengthened her blade. She had knelt at the cenotaph and spoken her piece and had arisen like she had been reborn. The shadow that dwelt in her heart was poor shield for what came after, but better comfort, and a fit companion for a world drenched in light. She had not dreamed of the Vault for a long time.

Why now? She knows a man who can change history, and can probably demand this favor from him. She has pondered the option and rejected it, after meeting another man who wanted nothing more than to revive all the ghosts of his past. Had she but made understood to him the lessons she’s learned in pursuit of these dark arts she practices, could she have saved him? Should she want to? Is it her duty to redeem every son of House Galvus?

It’s not the prince who sleeps at her back. Not the prince and not the rogue. Not the knight either. Something about the man who sleeps beside her _feels_ the same as her vanquished champion, though. Something about his hard-won easy smile, and how natural it is to return that gesture. She speaks freely, breathes easy, as she has not done for what feels like an age. There’s something familiar, too, about the sharp edge of guilt she feels when she reflects on her happiness. Now, as then, her friends are absent. The realm is bereft their guidance, their protection. Her foremost concern should be to see them restored. It doesn’t matter that she has no insight. It doesn’t matter that they have no ideas.

She should not be here. And she should be here as much as she can, because for every joining there is a parting. For every joy there is a sorrow. Soon, perhaps, it will come to this. She reaches past him to retrieve her bracelets from the shelf. Before she can put them on, he stirs. His hand catches at her arm. She knows the gesture, has performed it herself, begged her knight to stay thereby. But she cannot think to see him in the light of dawn. That might be too much. She takes his hand in hers, and waits for it to grow cold.

It does not, and does not, and does not, though it might, it will, it must, and when he looks at her in the dim and traces the shape of her lips as if to say _a smile would better suit you,_ she’s less sure than ever where she stands.


	6. Go, therefore, like the eye of an angel to awaken his courage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #6: First Steps**  
Odette de Dzemael & Colette de Dzemael. Odette de Dzemael/Aymeric de Borel.  
[[Title](http://www.poemswithoutfrontiers.org/La_Fleur_d_eau.html)]
> 
> Gen & M/F.

It was late in the evening, and the stars twinkled beyond Odette’s window. What they might portend she had no guess; perhaps her twin would know better. But neither of them were content now to rely overmuch on augury—there would be no opportune moments but the ones they made for themselves. Perhaps the Spinner would be kind to two daughters of Halone, but Odette doubted it. There had been too many failures on that score to convince her so now.

It was these thoughts that occupied her as her maid brushed her hair, long and silver, so that it fell in waves down her back. When she had nearly finished, but before she could begin the task of setting it and tucking it into her silken nightcap, Odette lifted one finger of the hand that rested upon her vanity. The girl—or perhaps not a girl at all, Odette reflected, being only a few years younger than Odette herself—stopped at once.

“Bring my jewelry box, please, Brigitte,” she said.  
If the maid thought it odd she did not dare say so, only set the brush aside and curtsied. “At once, miss,” she said. When she returned with the velvet-lined trays in their silver box, she set it before Odette and resumed her place at her back.

Odette opened the lid and arrayed the contents before her. A dazzling array of gemstones glittered back, bright as the stars outside. Amethysts and pearls dominated, though there were many pieces older than Odette herself and not quite to her tastes—the Dzemael line was not as given to a particular canon of appearance as was, say, House Fortemps with its dark-haired count and his dark-haired sons. To look at Odette beside her cousin Archombadin, one might never have thought they were related, and it was not merely her mother’s Durendaire blood that made the difference. But such concerns were less material to her now—she perused her jewels not with an eye toward the Scholisticate’s benefactors’ gala or Manon de Hauterive’s next masque, but for something else.

The rings were small, even the elaborate ones easy to secret away. Most of the earrings were the same. Odette ran her fingers along the chain of one necklace, long enough to loop about her throat several times, a brooch with a swan motif she’d been given at her debut; a bracelet with a small reliquary said to hold a splinter of Saint Valeroyant’s lance. In the end she came to a string of pearls with a heavy pendant. Should one wish to disassemble it, Odette thought, it would be simple enough with a goldsmith’s tools to part the pendant from the pearls—to pry back the tines and let fall the stones—even to snip apart the string of pearls. But they would still be a bit too large, a touch too awkward.

Odette lifted the pendant from the tray, the pearls clacking against one another as she did. The candlelight caught on the pink sapphire that dominated the setting, and she ran her thumb along its facets for a moment. She was surpassingly fond of the piece, but it was impractical.  
“Brigitte,” she said after a moment.  
“Yes, miss,” her maid said, and in the mirror Odette could watch her gaze fall upon the stone in her hand. “Would you like me to have that made ready for the ball next week?”  
“No,” Odette said. She turned about in her chair, offering the necklace up. “This is for you.”  
“Miss Odette,” Brigitte protested. “I couldn’t possibly!”  
Odette shook her head. “You really must,” she said, nonplussed. “There will be no work for you here soon.”  
“And a deal sooner if it’s said that I stole my lady’s jewels!”  
Odette blinked. Then she shook her head. “I’ll write a letter of recommendation to guard your reputation, but soon there will be nothing for you here. I tell you this in strictest confidence.”  
Brigitte laughed, not with joy but merely surprise. “What am I to do with this?” she wondered. “This is fit for wearing to your uncle’s investiture, not any occasion _I _might attend!”  
“Then sell it,” Odette said. Her tone was airy, but there was a part of her that despaired at the idea of her necklace going to market. “I can think of one occasion it might be meet for, though,” she said.  
“Oh, and what is that?” Brigitte retorted. Her surprise had made her bold, but that boldness only made Odette smile.  
“Your wedding, of course,” Odette said. “You must know that Micheloux is fond of you.”  
“And I am fond of him, but what of it?”  
Odette simply shrugged. As she stacked the trays back into the silver box, she spoke. “Since Grandpère is abdicating, he’ll have more need of his draftsmen than ever. Micheloux will have steady work, and if you retire from this house on the occasion of your marriage, no one would remark on it.”  
Brigitte seemed to consider this, staring down at the necklace in her hand. “My lady is much too kind,” she said.  
“Not kind,” Odette said. “Only practical.” Not kind at all.

* * *

“Selfish girl,” a woman was saying. Her teacup rattled against the saucer, placed there indelicately by an angry hand. Estellise de Dzemael was perfectly composed in public, but from time to time in private her mask would slip. “What was she thinking? At a time like this.”  
“She’s getting married, Maman,” Colette said placidly. She sipped at her tea. “It can’t be helped.”

Estellise huffed in annoyance. “She could at least have waited until after the feast. It’s obvious that Odette can’t dress herself, and I won’t have you embarrassing us on such an important occasion.”  
“Whatever could you possibly mean?” Odette asked. She did not meet her mother’s eyes, only looked down at the milky tea still remaining in her cup.  
“Look at you,” Estellise admonished. “You came to tea in your jerkin!”  
“Yes, Maman,” Odette said. “I had patrol this morning, as you well know. I was lucky to make it back at all.”  
“I don’t mind sharing the services of my maid,” Colette said. She reached for one of the little sandwiches set on a tray between the three of them.  
Estellise slapped the back of her hand: “Stop that,” she said, “or we’ll have to schedule _another_ fitting, and there isn’t time! Look at you, your clothes barely fit you as it is!”  
Odette exchanged a glance with her sister, and in that look was the secret language of twins: it was true that Colette’s clothes perhaps didn’t fit her as well as they usually did, but she’d gone back to wearing foundation garments that made her uncomfortable. The newer replacements were in need of a bit of sewing up, but with a bit of luck they’d be ready before the new count’s investiture feast. Odette doubted that made the remark any easier to bear in the moment, though. Later, she was sure, she would hold Colette’s head against her shoulder and stroke her hair.

For the moment, though, Estellise seemed satisfied that her younger daughter was cowed, and turned her rancor back on Odette. “You had no duties the other day,” she said, “when you joined my sister and I at luncheon, and you were half a mess then too.”  
“I thought I looked quite nice,” Odette said. “That gown is your favorite color, and I’ve always gotten compliments on it, so I really don’t know what you mean.”  
“A woman with no jewels is half-undressed,” Estellise hissed. “You might as well have showed up naked.”  
“There’s a thought,” Odette quipped.  
Her mother’s face crumpled with anger. “You didn’t wear so much as a necklace! Where was that gaudy thing you love so much, hmm? It’s ugly, but at least you wouldn’t have looked shabby.”  
“It needed a bit of polishing,” Odette said simply. “You won’t see it before the feast.” She wouldn’t see it after, but there was no point in telling her mother that.  
Estellise shook her head. “My sister will think we’ve fallen on hard times, to say nothing of how the servants will talk. Why are you always creating trouble for me, ungrateful child?”  
“If it makes you feel any better,” Odette said, “I will point out that I’m wearing my favorite earrings right now.”

* * *

She was wearing them a few days later, too, when she adjourned herself to the Congregation of Our Knights Most Heavenly. It was not merely House Dzemael which was experiencing a changing of the guard, and the Temple Knights’ headquarters were abuzz with activity. Odette cast her gaze about for the shock of white hair that usually allowed her to pick Estinien out of the crowd. The dragoon had always been closer to her twin than to her, but Odette didn’t doubt but that he could point her where she needed to go—at least for the pleasure of being shut of her thereafter.

Spying a head of pale hair, Odette fair sprinted up the steps. “Estinien,” she called, and that head turned.  
It was not Estinien at all, and she didn’t know how she’d made the mistake. The pale hair crowned a woman wearing a silvery circlet. Her eyes were brilliantly sea-green, and would have been beautiful if they did not look on Odette so coldly.  
“You’re …” Odette said, groping for an end to that sentence.  
“Ser Lucia,” she replied. “And you are Ser Odette de Dzemael. Were you looking for Ser Estinien?”  
Odette shook her head briefly, as though she could as easily shrug off her discomfort. “I was looking for Ser Aymeric, actually.”  
“The _Lord-Commander_ is indisposed,” Ser Lucia replied.  
“Oh, I doubt that very much,” Odette said, laughing to herself as she turned away.

It should have bothered her, perhaps—Aymeric was a year her junior, after all, and though he was a skilled swordsman that had never been what had seen him promoted. It might have been easier to resent him had she not known that the rumors surrounding his birth were true—and had she not known him as he grappled with the implications as he came of age. Instead, as she made her way to the Lord Commander’s seat, she almost pitied him. The old accusations would come up again, like a bad gil, and he would have to weather them alone.

Aymeric’s office as Second Commander sat vacant, awaiting some new appointment to replace him, and so Odette continued to the end of the hall. She pressed her ear to the door, as she’d had long practice doing, but heard no voices within. _Indisposed._ What had this strange woman thought to do by keeping Odette from him? She shook her head, and lifted her hand to knock.

He really was everything a knight should be, and she remembered it every time he fixed her with those sky-blue eyes. Standing in the doorway to the chambers that were his new seat of power, Aymeric smiled at her. “Ah,” he said. “Odette. To what do I owe the pleasure? ’Tis an early hour yet for lunch.”  
Tempting as it had been to slip in at midday for a more proper farewell, Odette only shook her head. “I needed to speak with you,” she said. Then she said something strange: “Lord-Commander.”  
He frowned at her, his skin crinkling between his brows. “Of course,” he said, and took a step back to allow her in. He closed the door a moment later, and Odette led him back to the desk—his desk, already stacked with reams of paperwork and reports.

“I met someone interesting on the way in here,” Odette said. “A Ser Lucia? She had told me you were busy.”  
Aymeric glanced aside a moment. “Ser Lucia is my aide,” he said. “She was stationed at the Convictory before this, I believe, and recalled to aid in the transition. Perhaps she was simply overzealous in guarding my time. You must imagine there are any number of questions right now, and if I were to answer each one personally, I would have time for nothing else.”  
Odette pursed her lips. “No,” she said, “she knew who I was … so she ought to have known you’d want to see me. Besides, I’ve actually come on business for once.”  
Aymeric nodded. “What is it?”

Odette drew her sword. She held it loosely in one hand with the practiced ease that came from spending half a lifetime learning its use, but she did not wield it then, merely held it—at least until she laid it across his desk. “I’ve come to tender my resignation,” she said.  
He laughed—but like Brigitte a sennight before, his laughter was not borne of amusement but surprise. “Surely you have more faith in me than that,” he said. “Are we not old friends?”  
They were more than that, but Odette merely nodded. “I think the Archbishop chose wisely when he elected to appoint you to the position,” she said, “and I think that would be the case even if matters did not … stand as they do.” She set beside the blade a small book bound in leather covers—an illuminated manuscript that contained the text of her commission with the Temple Knights. That had been a gift from Aymeric himself, though he had protested it was from all of House Borel at the time. She slid it across the desk toward him.  
“Odette,” he said softly. “I have known you for the better part of my life, and in all that time you have wanted nothing so much as you have wanted to serve the Temple Knights.”

He was right, of course. She had even wanted it more than she’d wanted him—at least she had always been true to her office, if little else. “Things have changed,” she said. “You will have heard that Grandpère is retiring?”  
“Of course,” Aymeric said. “Colette told me weeks ago that Count Tarresson was abdicating.”  
“Circumstances at the house will not permit my service here any longer,” Odette said.  
Aymeric regarded her curiously. “Are you then to be a knight of your house instead?” he wondered.  
Odette looked down at the little book, in which had been written all her dreams. She was surprised at the ache in her chest—it had been easy to give up her jewels, and their value in coin at least was far dearer than the manuscript, though she did not doubt it had cost Aymeric a great deal to have it made—especially as a boy of fifteen summers counted such things. “It is because of those events I must withdraw my blade from service,” she said.  
“And if I refuse?” Aymeric said softly.  
“You would make of me a deserter?” Odette asked. There was a sharp note of panic in her voice.  
“Keep your blade,” the Lord-Commander said. “Ishgard may have need of it in the future.”  
She shook her head. “Should you call for it, I cannot promise to answer.”

“Ah,” he said after a moment. “So you are leaving.”  
A cold thrill shot through her, and she lifted her gaze to his. Others had suspected, perhaps, but she saw his confidence there in those eyes that ought to have been cold. “None have dared to say so,” she replied.  
“Not even you?” he murmured.  
“I cannot answer your questions, Aymeric,” she said softly. For a moment she felt a pang of heartache. It sat foreign in her breast, so strange that she was convinced for a moment it should have been his. Why should it have been? She had cause to wonder, and found herself turning over in her mind Ser Lucia’s eyes, dark and cold as the deep ocean.  
“Keep your blade,” Aymeric said once more, gently this time. “When I hear word that you have gone, you will be gone on a mission, and the duty to investigate will rest with me.”  
“Will you come after me?” Odette asked.  
He must have gauged the note of fear in her voice. “No,” he said. “Will I see you again before you go?”  
“No,” she replied.  
“Then may I kiss you goodbye?”

She only nodded, afraid of how her voice might sound if she dared to speak. Aymeric lifted a hand to her chin, his delicate touch tipping her face upward so that he could lean down and let his lips brush hers. He kissed her as gently as morning dew, and she repaid him, and for a long few moments they stood exchanging what would be their last kiss, until the next came, and the next, and in the end he put his arms around her and held her to his chest, his lips brushing her forehead.

Odette had the terrible inkling then that he might ask her to stay—to trade being a daughter for being a wife; one sort of bondage for another. She also had a horrible premonition that if she allowed herself to hear the question, she would say yes. She could not allow that to come to pass, so she retrieved her sword and her commission, and put the Congregation and its knightly commander at her back.

* * *

It was at her back when she stood beneath the Arc of the Worthy, her chocobo’s reins in hand. The bird was bridling at the delay, or perhaps at the sounds of a busy square. Odette was more than a little nervous herself—and dwelling on the details was no help. She could feel links of chain pressed against her skin, body-warm through her undershirt. It had taken weeks to sew them in beside the bones of her stays, and she had never been patient enough for embroidery until she had to be.

A few moments later, Finnea’s nervous chirrups were answered by the _kweh!_ of another chocobo, and Odette turned her head to watch her twin approach. She was not alone, Odette was surpassingly annoyed to notice—there was a man sat astride the saddle behind her.

“Who’s this?” Odette demanded to know.  
“Nobody important,” the man said. He had dark skin and hair, and his features were not familiar.  
“Rempart Myste,” Colette said. “He works in the stables and found me readying my bird.”  
“Keen to join us on our ride into the countryside?” Odette asked. “I had hoped to go riding alone with my sister before all the excitement begins back at the house.”  
“I dropped one of my saddlebags,” Colette explained. “When he saw what I was carrying …”  
Odette turned her eyes on the man—Rempart. “Are you blackmailing my sister?”  
“No, miss,” he said.  
“I thought you were supposed to be loyal to House Dzemael,” Odette mused.  
“I swore my oaths to Count Tarresson,” Rempart replied, “not to his fool son. And unless I miss my guess, _you_ were supposed to be loyal to House Dzemael, too.”  
“What do you want, then?” Odette asked.  
It was Colette that answered. “He wants what we want,” she said. “He wants out of that terrible house.” Colette hesitated. “He … dreams the same dreams.”

She swung herself up into the saddle of her chocobo and together the three of them passed beneath the Arc of the Worthy. The Steps of Faith stretched out before them, brilliantly white in the morning sun. Beyond them lay Coerthas, vast and green, and beyond that, the whole world.

“Then it’s past time we were gone, isn’t it?” Odette said.


	7. returned, to your place of dreaming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #7: Forgiven**  
Aris Greensorrow  
[[Title](https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/dear-dja-baby-boori)]

You leave the wood and they never tell your story again. Of all the things you could do, that is the transgression that will obliterate you from history. That is the sin that parts you from your family, the one that has been with you since before you were born.

What becomes of them? Of your mate, whom you loved and saw but rarely? What becomes of your murdered son? There are things, too, that you cannot forgive. You cannot forgive the Empire for killing him. You cannot forgive yourself for failing to save him.

You will never see him again.


	8. To lay down their reckless heads

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #8: Rencounter**  
Zenos yae Galvus.  
[[Title](http://russiasgreatwar.org/docs/twelve_notes.pdf)]
> 
> Gen.
> 
> Day 8 was a free/make-up day. I have elected to use these for AUs. For more on Shasi sas Intemperatus, see [my tumblr.](https://starcunning.tumblr.com/tagged/shasi-sas-intemperatus/chrono)

Livia sas Junius is dead; the last major casualty of the Eorzean campaign. Her killer walks in the procession, and that is the only thing about these proceedings that holds any interest for Zenos. He sits at his father’s right hand; to the left of _him_ is Zenos’s great-grandsire, rheumy and wheezing.

Solus zos Galvus will not survive another winter in Garlemald. Perhaps this is what made the Black Wolf bold. Zenos considers it, and decides that in the end he would have done the same. His Radiance has not yet decided to name an heir. It is for this reason and no other that Zenos has been dragged into the public eye—he is a prince of the blood, and proof perhaps of Varis yae Galvus’s readiness to rule.

But Zenos finds little savor in politics; in the intrigues of court. He cares little for the corpse laid in state, and less for the bust the Black Wolf carries of his martyred pup. Sas Junius is—was—some few years Zenos’s senior, but her features are too soft, too girlish. Little wonder she hid them so often behind that ivory helm of hers.

The Black Wolf’s face, too, is a mask of anguish. Zenos ponders this for a moment. He tries to imagine his own father mourning so openly, should Zenos be killed. It is an impossibility—Prince Varis has never had anything but contempt for him, though not enough to act with his own hands. His father is a coward and a bore.

Zenos looks then at the murderess—the _eikon_-slayer herself. Van Baelsar’s reports to the capital have been incomplete, to say the least, but even so her legend has reached the Empire’s ears. It is because of her that Eorzea has fallen, and the Black Wolf must answer for the murder of his adopted daughter by making her killer the Viceroy of that god-blighted land.

She is smaller than Zenos expected, though in comparison to the tales they tell, anyone would be. There are scars across her face, and when she lifts her gaze to regard the throne as she passes, he notes that the injury has taken her left eye.

Then she turns her face away, and the procession moves on. The pyre is further along the viaduct, and they approach it with slow, measured steps. The central column of mourners is flanked on either side by a more general press of bodies that ambles along with it—soldiers of the XIVth, mostly, though there are civilians as well. Something about the churn of the crowd strikes Zenos as unusual, and alertness returns to him.

The eikon-slayer’s ruined eye is turned away from him, where he sits on the royal balcony. On her far side—her blind side—he can see someone cutting through the crowd, sluicing through others like he’s in a hurry. If the mourners find this odd, they make no comment. Perhaps, Zenos considers, nobody will much care if the _eikon_-slayer is murdered in her turn. The assassin steps into the column, matching pace evenly.

The _eikon_-slayer turns, then, and her right hand closes around his throat. Her blind eye is toward Zenos now, her scar-twisted face distorting any emotion that might show there. He thinks she may crush the man’s windpipe, but instead she shoves him back. He stumbles a few steps, goes down, and it’s only then that Zenos sees the bloodstained steel in her left hand. Even from this distance, Zenos knows the shape of the knife—it’s Garlean make, and common among Frumentarium agents. She casts it aside a moment later, turns back, and resumes her place at the Black Wolf’s back as though unperturbed by this.

Zenos wonders how she knew he was there. It ought to have been clean, by his reckoning. She should be dead. Instead she marches on, head held high. Zenos watches her. Alertness has turned to intrigue; to fascination. He wonders what it would be like to try his blade against her. Perhaps she could stand against him for more time than it takes for him to fill his lungs with breath.

“That one,” he says at length. “The _eikon_-slayer. What do they call her?”  
Only silence answers him a long moment. His Radiance seems not to have heard the question nor had the faculties to answer, and his royal father has no inclination to illuminate him.  
“Intemperatus,” one of the servants answers at last. “Shasi sas Intemperatus.”


	9. Daisies spring from damnèd seeds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #9: Hesitate**  
X'shasi Kilntreader ♦ Urianger Augurelt.  
[[Title](https://poets.org/poem/weeds)]
> 
> Gen.

When she came in, Urianger was halfway through his cup of tea. He set it before him and smiled at her, and she could not help but mirror the gesture.  
“I had it on good authority you hated that stuff,” Shasi said, setting her pack beside the door.  
“Thou wouldst put store by pixie authority?” he asked. There was a gentle amusement in his tone.  
“Of course not,” she said, stooping to scoop up a few apples that had fallen to the floor, scattered some distance from the bowl that ought to have held them. “I’m beginning to think that of all the courses of study in Sharlayan, ‘organization’ was absent the list.”  
His chair scraped the floor as he stood, crossing the anteroom to aid her in her hopeless effort at tidying up. “Alas,” he said, “we Archons of Louisoix’s party were consumed by more pressing concerns. Thou art one to give a lecture in any case, my lady.”  
She flicked an ear in annoyance that was perhaps more genuine than he’d meant. “How would you know?” she asked. “It’s not as though you’ve seen how I’ve been living for …”  
“Three years,” he finished for her.  
“They seem to have agreed with you,” she told him, but she could not make it as cheerful as she ought.

It was true—he seemed lighter, somehow, though given the circumstances perhaps that was a charged word. It was not all down to the change in his garb, either, glad though she was to see him give up his hood and goggles. Not that such things had ever served to obscure him from her in the ways that mattered; they made themselves understood to one another. Still, it seemed he had found some ease here, though that only put him in starker contrast to those that had not.

“Another of the peculiarities of Sharlayan is the cooking,” he said, placing a gentle hand at her elbow to shepherd her from the door. “’Tis very bland, and thus I find such sweets as are common here overbearing. Yet the demands of politesse dictate I refuse not a fae’s gift, and thus am I burdened with their consumption. Perhaps thou wouldst do me the kindness of sharing this burden?”  
Shasi let him lead her to the table, and sat opposite him. She contemplated the time since she had done so last—some few moons, she knew, but most of the days that comprised them were lost to her. It might have been a sennight ago. It might have been five years. The disorientation of such darkness as had plagued her on the Source had given way to the oppressive light of the First, which made days no easier to number. Still, however she counted, he had endured far longer. She doubted if he remembered sitting in a room with her, each of them ignoring the other in favor of the ghosts she had conjured. Shasi regarded the plate between them. It was stacked with cookies—she herself had put them there to appease her pixie taskmasters hours before. “You do realize I _actually_ don’t care for dessert,” she reminded him.  
“Then be thou not obligated to accept mine offer,” he said. “Wilt thou take tea, at least?”  
“That much I can do,” Shasi said, nodding.

He went to pick through the vessels and dishware that cluttered a set of shelves against one wall, and Shasi watched him putter about a bit before she cast her gaze over the rest of the room. It was hard to imagine it as a hunting lodge—three years of the detritus of Urianger’s residency had all but obliterated any sign of its original purpose. The only tell was the stuffed head mounted in the cupola, which looked rather well-preserved given its presumed age. He was settling in well here, and the thought tore her heart. It felt, she decided, just like the same terrible shock that had come when she had absorbed the Lightwarden’s essence.

She was stirred from her reverie by the sound of him setting a cup before her, and she turned her face back toward him and smiled.  
“Full glad am I to see you, my lady,” he said.  
She did not know what to say to that, so she scalded her tongue with too-hot tea instead. After a moment of panting, wincing at her own recklessness, she had it. Or at least she had something. “Were I not to arrive,” she said, “it would fall to Minfilia to avert your prophecy, wouldn’t it.”  
He visibly winced. “Thou art correct,” he said at length. “On that matter we were not all agreed, but Master Thancred ever endeavored to convince us.”  
“He is different too,” she said absently, though it made her no gladder to note than had the change in Urianger—and _he,_ at least, seemed happy. “Well,” she said, clearing her throat. “I am come, and the work already begun. So there’s that to be glad of, at least.”  
Urianger regarded her a long moment, setting his cookie back down on the plate before him. “As thou sayest,” he replied. There was a glumness in his tone which matched his dispirited expression. Perhaps he had gotten too used to the shield of his obscurity, to wear his emotions so openly. “My lady,” he said after a moment, and there was something tentative about it.  
“What is it, Urianger?” she asked. She could not afford to bear her reactions so openly, and so she did her best to keep the weariness from her tone. It was not Urianger’s fault she had been called to this world, after all—though she did not doubt but that he blamed himself, after all that had transpired with Elidibus.  
“I am glad to see thee,” he said, “foremost because thou art my friend. The loss of Eorzea’s champions I have weathered ere now—my mentor and my friend; I count too among these tragedies thy peer, a loss so complete that even now I cannot speak that absent hero’s name. While I would do all within my power to save thee for the realm’s sake, I would count myself glad to spare thee such misfortune for nothing more than the sake of thy place in my regard.”

It was not merely his face and arms that he had stripped bare, then. He seemed altogether too naked then, though nothing of his physical aspect had changed. She could not hold his gaze then, though to tear her attention from his golden eyes was to turn it upon this house which belonged to him so utterly that it was written in every ilm of it.

She wanted to flee into the night—but first she would have to restore the night to this place to manage it. So she stood, and drank the rest of her tea in one too-long pull. “Thank you, Urianger.” The words were stilted in her throat, but if he made any reply she did not stay long enough to hear it.

For a mercy, he did not pursue her, and when she closed the door behind herself she was shut too of him, and of that terrible, comfortable place. She fixed her eyes upon the blazing sky above, and realized her breathing had grown shallow, as though the few yalms she had sprinted to the door were malms instead.

“There you are!” came a voice, and a pixie flitted into view. “You are Feo Ul’s pactmate, aren’t you?”  
Shasi regarded the pixie with cold eyes. She imagined the pranks to come, and found her mood blacker than ever. Still, should worse come to worst, she could invoke that bond. Shasi nodded.  
“Can you swim?” they wondered. “There is a particular plant that grows in the water. We trade with the Fuath for it, usually, but maybe you could harvest some?”  
She considered the question. A refusal rose to the tip of her tongue—Fray’s answer, like as not; she had yet to decide on her own. She would rather work than think, and she still needed the pixies’ gratitude if she thought to enter Lyhe Ghiah. “What plant? What does it look like?” she asked.  
“It’s very pretty,” they said. “It has big fronds and grows flowers when it reaches the surface. The Fuath call it whirlweed. I need the whole plant, even the bulb.”  
“Fine,” Shasi said, and made for the lake.

It was dim and cool in the water, and there was a strange relief in letting it flood her lungs. But then she was alone with the work, and with her thoughts. And with Fray, too, who said nothing, but she could feel him stirring in her heart as he often did when her emotions had run high.

She walked among the weeds, in the sparkling water, and if the Fuath watched, she did not see them. She thought of Thancred, and of Minfilia—the young Minfilia, the one who resided in this world and who looked at her with the same clouded crystal eyes as the Antecedent. There would be no passing this cup to her—not even something so small as what she did now. After all, Shasi doubted she could breathe underwater.

The whirlweed grew almost as tall as Shasi herself, its central stalk buoyed upward toward the surface by translucent pods. There were buds at the end of its stalk, small and not ready to open, but she imagined that when they reached the surface they would unfurl. Its long fronds wrapped around her arms as she uprooted it, pulling it easily from the silty bottom of the lake. She collected a half-dozen and decided that was more than enough.

The plants went limp in her arms as she surfaced, and she carried them awkwardly, like one might a sleeping child. Water dripped from her, blurring her vision, but she kept an eye out for her pixie taskmaster. She found them back by the Bookman’s Shelves, though she approached on timorous feet.

“Don’t worry,” they said. “Urianger is out. Now we can prank him!”  
She was in little mood for that, though, so instead she said only, “What do you want with these?”  
The pixie flitted closer, stretching out one little hand. “I’ll enchant the bulbs,” they said, and a moment later the plants seemed to change in her arms, growing more rigid. Better suited for land. “While you were getting them, I dug up some of the earth. We’re going to plant these, and he’ll be so confused when he sees water plants growing in front of his house!”

They laughed, but Shasi only staggered toward one of the little beds the pixie had dug. She set the whirlweeds aside, and they stood tall, swaying gently in the breeze. Shasi looked at the tilled soil, and the plants, and the house, and refused to call it by its name. If she had learned anything from the fae it was that there was far too much power in names.

“Just drop them in,” the pixie urged.  
Shasi closed a hand about the base of one plant, but found she could move no further. It was no enchantment that had her spellbound, nor had the fronds of the weed wrapped about her limbs again, she simply could not bear the thought of planting this yard. Hot tears joined the cold water already on her cheeks, and she felt the stirring of the air as the pixie drew near.  
“Does going in the water make your eyes leak like that?” they wondered. “You mortals are so strange! Next time I’ll just ask the Fuath!”

Shasi had no retort for that. Minfilia had likened the pixies to children not long after their arrival, and how could Shasi explain that she wept? Moreover, how could she give voice to the reasons why? She shook her head. To plant these flowers was to give this dwelling another name—a name she did not wish it to have. It was to make this place Urianger’s home, and to assume that he would be there to see these plants bloom. If she knelt to plant flowers for him anywhere, it should have been before the Waking Sands, though she would have been gladder still if he had adjourned to the Stones with the rest of them.

But she had her work, and that was far more important than her feelings, so she mounded soil around the fragile plants, and watered them with her tears.


	10. Now flooded with moonlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #10: Foster**  
Gaius van Baelsar/Midas nan Garlond  
[[Title](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9619/pg9619-images.html)]
> 
> M/M. Pre-canon (the year is 1561, the 39th year of Solus zos Galvus's reign).

The sky overhead was cold but clear, carpeted with a thousand stars, each of them reflected and mottled in the lake around them. Midas was looking at none of them, though his face turned heavenward just the same.

No, he had eyes only for the crimson moon. Perhaps that should have nettled Gaius more than it did—Meteor was van Darnus’s ambition, and the Black Wolf and White Raven had stood often enough at odds. There were other things that concerned him more in the moment, like the toll the past hand-span of years seemed to have taken on Mid. He was greying a bit, and when he removed his glasses, Gaius could see the beginnings of crows’ feet framing those intense blue eyes.

They were of an age, or near enough, but they did not look it. It was not something that bore commenting on—Mid was not vain, exactly, but the hand of the years had been gentler with Gaius. If he had been pressed, though, Gaius would have said it made him look distinguished.

Still, watching Mid stare up at the moon, he looked more melancholy than anything else. His somber air ill suited the evening, and he seemed to know it by the furtive look he stole at Gaius a few moments later.

“This should be a happy occasion,” Mid said.  
Gaius only nodded, drawing abreast of him at the prow of the ship. “It is,” he said.  
“Cid has barely said two words to me since I got back.”  
Gaius chuckled softly to himself. “He is under a great deal of stress,” he pointed out. “Lucretia scarcely bore me any regard whatsoever when she was preparing to become a magistrate. It will pass.”  
Mid lifted a hand to his brow, brushing back his hair. Silver shot through the shaggy, pale blond strands. “Will it,” he said, sounding unconvinced.  
“I have to hope so,” Gaius said, frowning.  
“Your sister and our son are not very much alike,” Mid pointed out.  
“They are alike in a few key ways,” Gaius said. “Both have a towering legacy to live up to, as does Livia.”  
Midas regarded him sidelong, pressing his lips together in much the same way he did when some engineering problem vexed him. “Have you told her yet?” he wondered.  
“No,” Gaius said, perhaps too curtly.

Midas let that sit a while, his sigh gusting through the stillness of the night air. The lake lapped at the sides of the barge. “Has he told you what he’ll do after graduation?” he asked. He scratched at his cheek, fingernails rasping over the stubble there.  
“He means to stay on, so far as I know,” Gaius said.  
“Good,” Mid said. “Good. I thought he might enlist so that he could follow you to Ala Mhigo.”  
Gaius shook his head. “Even when I invited him, he came but rarely. I don’t think it suits him there.”  
“I’m not sure the academy will suit him either,” Midas said. “Most of their research is for weapons development.”  
“He should thrive there,” Gaius said. “He’s at the top of his class.”  
“Yes,” Midas said, “but his heart’s not in it. Do you remember the incident the spring after he enrolled?”  
How could Gaius forget? It had only been the most harrowing day of his life. The invasion of Ala Mhigo had been a sunny countryside walk compared to receiving the news that Mid was being held hostage. Rather than say all that, he simply nodded.  
“What did he make that year for the contest?” Midas asked.  
“A drone,” Gaius said. “A hyperelectric turret.”  
Mid shook his head. “The cannon wasn’t part of his design. It was the other boy’s—Scaeva’s,” he said. “Cid built a flying machine.”  
“What about it?”  
“He didn’t build it with weaponry,” Mid said. “It didn’t occur to him to until the situation demanded he adapt.” Another sigh escaped him. “He’ll be perfectly happy designing walkers and airships and all-terrain tread walkers, and then they’ll weld guns to it and it’ll break his heart.”  
Gaius frowned. “I seem to recall him designing a few weapons himself.”  
“Unless he’s changed a lot since I’ve been gone, he found no satisfaction in it.” Midas laughed, the sound brittle and broken. “Truth be told, I don’t, either.”

It was Gaius who looked up at the stars then, as though they held some answer for him. His had always been a life given to war. For all the complexities of warfare, there was at least a simplicity to it: find the answer or die. He lifted his hand from his side, reaching out unseeing in the dark until he fit it to Midas’s own, left to right. On the smallest finger of that hand, Mid wore a band of steel—unassuming and work-worn, warm against Gaius’s skin.

“You have the Emperor’s esteem,” he said. It was difficult not to sound envious—especially given that he was. “And the support of House Darnus.”  
“And for these things I’ve made myself a stranger to my boy,” Midas said. “I have no real desire to go back to Bojza,” he said. “I haven’t since the people of that city tried to kidnap me. But it’s not as though I can refuse … and once I’m there, it doesn’t seem so bad. I should have written more often.”  
“Then,” Gaius said, snorting with derision, “make like your patron and finish it as quickly as you can.”  
That made Midas laugh more genuinely. “I like to think I could make a cleaner go of it than the blood-spattered White Raven,” he said. “We’re close. I can feel it, and then I can put it all behind me. Then maybe I can make things right,” Midas said. “With Cid, with you … even with Livia, perhaps, though she hardly knows me.”  


They could be a family—Cid following in his father’s footsteps, and Livia walking after Gaius’s own. Even with Eorzea lost, much as he abhorred the idea, that might be legacy enough.  
“The graduation ceremony is quite early,” Gaius said. “Should we return to the shore?”  
Midas shifted his weight, turning toward the other man, and Gaius mirrored the gesture. “Not just yet,” he said.

Drowned in starlight and the crimson light of Midas’s moon, Gaius did not feel the cold so keenly.


	11. I breathed my soul back into me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #11: Snuff**  
X'shasi Kilntreader/V'jaela Firebird  
[[Title](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55993/renascence)]
> 
> F/F. CW: Drug use, breath play, adult content.

Autumn in Thanalan was still as warm as summer elsewhere, though infinitely more palatable than the sticky, swampy heat of the Shroud. It was still pleasant enough for bare arms, should one be so inclined.

V’jaela certainly was, and the late afternoon sunlight gilded her deep brown skin. It filtered through the leaves of a half-dozen plants—various types of flowers, mostly—that grew from wooden boxes lining the rooftop terrace. It afforded them a little privacy, which was hard-come-by in the Goblet, and the last lingering blooms perfumed the air.

Perhaps the sweetness was not all down to the flowers, though—Jaela was sitting cross-legged on a cushion, pinching fogweed from a little tin. Its earthy-sweet smell was compounded by the scent of molasses. Shasi watched her with interest, but neither of them spoke for a while.

At length, V’jaela said, “Can you hand me that, please?” and reached past Shasi to indicate a small silver snuffbox. Shasi picked it up, and was surprised to find it was cold to the touch. She lifted it to inspect it—it was small, about the size of Shasi’s palm—and round, the metal patinaed to black in the recesses of its relief. Like many things about V’jaela, it was Thavnairian—the repeating geometric patterns spoke to that, finials winding amongst the flowers. What Shasi had taken for gems at the center of each rosette were, she realized, minuscule ice shards.

After a moment, she handed it over with a wry smile. V’jaela returned the expression, and there was no impatience in it. She plucked the lid off to reveal a dry brick of sandy color. There was something faintly spicy about the smell. “My father was from Thavnair,” she said as she broke off a bit, crushing it and mixing it with the fogweed shisha. “But my mother—well, one of my mothers—was from Sharlayan.”  
“And the other?” Shasi wondered.  
“Gyr Abania,” she replied. “She was a red mage too,” V’jaela continued, placing the bowl atop a hookah that sat before the pair, glittering in the sun. “Anyway, this curious bit of syncretism makes me think of them.” She closed the snuffbox, setting it aside, and snapped a thin metal plate into place atop the clay bowl. Atop that, she set a fire crystal.

Thin wisps of smoke rose in the afternoon air as V’jaela wiped her hands clean and sat back. She half-lounged over the pillows scattered across the floor, stretching out a hand to trail her fingernail along Shasi’s arm. The invitation went unspoken, but Shasi took it anyway, stretching out on her side. V’jaela curled one bare arm around Shasi’s shoulders, playing lightly with her hair.

There was only the one hose, not that either of them minded sharing. There was something elegant about the way that V’jaela handled herself—though it really only made sense; doubtless she had far more experience.

The glass sweated, beads of condensation catching the colors of sunset, and the world grew more distant, the edges of Shasi’s concern dulling. They took turns with the hookah, and in between drank honey lemonade with sprigs of mint, and Shasi allowed herself to simply enjoy the feeling of warm skin against her own. She traced the shape of Jaela’s clan markings, which tracked like dark tears from the inner corner of her eye down her cheeks.

Jaela leaned up to kiss her, gentle but inexorable. She tasted of smoke and spice and the lingering sweetness of honey lemons. The night deepened around them, and Jaela pulled her close for warmth, her lips lingering over Shasi’s skin.

“I want to try something,” Shasi said.  
Jaela’s eyes were alert then, mismatched and luminous. She nodded. “We can …”  
Shasi shifted her weight, propping herself up on one elbow, pressing Jaela back against the blankets with her hip. Their legs tangled together, their tails intertwining. “Take it out of me,” Shasi said, and took a long pull from the hookah. Then she leaned down to fit her mouth to Jaela’s own.

It’s slow, unhurried at first; Shasi let her breath all but trickle into Jaela’s mouth. She set the mouthpiece down to slip her hand under Jaela’s head, fingers knotting in her hair to hold them together. Jaela breathed in, her kiss desperate, sucking almost, drinking in the air and the smoke until there was nothing left in Shasi’s lungs. Shasi only held tighter then, her hand a fist in crimson hair. Her other arm slipped about Jaela’s shoulders, hand clamped. Jaela struggled against that hold only to slip her hands under Shasi’s shirt, her nails trailing over her back.

Shasi breathed in; her turn then to suck the air from Jaela’s lungs. The taste of smoke was weaker, commingled with the sweetness of Jaela’s mouth, and Shasi shifted her weight to lie more firmly atop the other woman, as though pressing the breath from her. She counted the seconds, breath passing from lungs to lungs—in and out between the pair of them, hazy with the smoke and dizzy with the lack of fresh air. Her pulse was palpable somewhere behind her eyes, as real and immediate as the feeling of Jaela’s hardening nipples through the silk of her shirt. Shasi drew back, gulping fresh air. Jaela shuddered, panting. It was a sweet sound, hot and desperate.

She reached for the mouthpiece then, filling her lungs, and lifted her head to offer Shasi her breath.


	12. And not in vain you’ve sent me light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #12: Fingers Crossed**  
Caelina Valeria & Nero tol Scaeva.  
[[Title](https://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/pushkin/angel.html)]
> 
> Gen.

The Crystal Tower rose on the far side of the lake, the waters of Silvertear spanking against the sides of the little boat. The sky was bright with aetherial haze, and there was a tension in the air. Or perhaps merely in Caelina’s shoulders.

“Just the two of you, then?” the ferryman asked. He was a tall Roegadyn man, dressed in a simple scholars’ garb—likely one of the scholars from Saint Coinach’s Find. He offered up a cheery smile, though she had little heart to return it.  
“Not so fast,” came a voice from the shore. Caelina’s eyes whipped past the ferryman toward the source of that voice, but only to confirm what she already knew. Nero tol Scaeva stood grinning at her, the light glinting off the rims of his spectacles. “I couldn’t exactly let them deliver you into Garlond’s arms unaccompanied, could I?” he asked, already climbing into the boat.  
Tataru made some noise of disapproval, scrambling to get out of the way of his too-long legs. “We didn’t think you’d make it,” she said. She found a perch at the bow of the boat, as far from Nero as she could manage.  
“I didn’t think to ask,” Caelina admitted. “Most of the team has been on this for weeks, and I didn’t imagine President Jaye would let the books run red that long.”  
“She won’t,” Nero said. “I have projects to be getting back to, but I think she knew that she couldn’t keep me from the Tower. Especially when _you_ were going.”

Caelina laughed, and as they pushed off from shore, she leaned down to trail her fingers through the water. Aether tingled against her skin. “You know,” she said, “I don’t think I ever asked how you found out about the expedition in the first place.”  
Nero shrugged one shoulder. “It’s only the most notable Allagan ruin in Aldenard,” he said. “When it became clear to me that the Fourteenth was in shambles—and I would not be welcomed back to the Empire—it seemed like the most natural destination. It wasn’t far to go from Meridianum. Then Garlond turned up and started sniffing around.”  
“Ah, yes,” Caelina laughed, flicking her wet fingers at him. “Your two favorite subjects.”  
Nero made an annoyed sound, rolling up his sleeve so he could splash at her in return. “Garlond is my least favorite subject,” he protested.

Caelina shook her head, turning to look over her shoulder at the tower. “I didn’t know what to make of you then,” she said. “I was sure that you would haul me back to the Empire for a pat on the head and a promotion, but I was equally sure that your bluster hid a philanthropic streak a mile wide.”  
Nero laughed. “Have you made your mind up yet?”  
Caelina turned back toward him, grinning. “I know you’re only coming with me to the site so you can make off with me and the artifacts at the same time.”  
“Yes, of course,” Nero said. “You’ve all fallen into my cunning trap, and it only took me five years and a great deal of happenstance.” They shared a laugh over that, and then Nero sobered, pulling his spectacles off. He folded them and set them in his lap. “Lina,” he said after a moment.  
“What is it?”  
He cleared his throat. “Returning here has reminded me of how lost I felt in those days,” he said. “Gods know Baelsar wanted little enough to do with me, guilty as I was of the crime of not being Garlond, and Livia ever followed where he led. Even Arvina and I rarely saw eye to eye. I had few friends in the Fourteenth. Still, knowing—or thinking I knew, since Baelsar insists on proving me wrong—that they were all lost to me was …” He lifted his sunglasses, tapping the folded hinge against his lower lip. “Difficult,” he said. “And the Scions liked you a hell of a lot more than anyone had ever liked me.”  
“Nero,” she said, her voice soft.  
“Until you!” he added quickly. “That’s what I meant! That I know how this has felt, and I hope you find your answer.”  
“I’ll settle for finding your aetherometer,” she said with a lopsided sort of smile.  
Nero shrugged. “I don’t want it anymore.”

The boat moored at a little dock, and Tataru scrambled to debark. She regarded the pair of them with an odd sort of look before turning and walking to the end of the pier. Beyond her, a cave—dug out by men and not nature—yawned, awaiting her. The ramp down to the trench had to be there.

Nero helped her out of the boat, and then clambered out himself. “There’s one more thing,” he said, patting the pockets of his Ironworks vest. “The person you saw in your vision said he was taking you somewhere …”  
“Yes,” Caelina said. “To the First.”  
“I thought you might like something to remind you of home,” he said, at last finding what he was looking for—a small, cloth-rolled package. He thrust it unceremoniously at Caelina.  
She took it, carefully unwrapping it. It was a porcelain statuette about the size of her hand of a slender woman in a draped robe, wings unfurled behind her. From the pinions of her wings hung small bronze bells, which tinkled softly in the air. Taking a closer look, Caelina saw the statue’s crown of laurels and third eye. “What is it?” she asked.  
Nero furrowed his brow. “A tintinnabulum,” he said. “To decorate wherever you end up staying. The Emperor had them made in his wife’s image. Winged victory and all that. They’re supposed to be lucky.”  
Caelina wracked her brain, trying to remember the sound of bells in her childhood. “I don’t think we ever had one,” she said. “Certainly not after we came to Eorzea; we didn’t want to give people the wrong impression.”  
Nero winced. “Well. It’ll remind you of me, then. How is that?”  
Caelina smiled, gently swinging it back and forth to hear the bells chime. “That’s alright then. I didn’t think they believed in good luck charms, in the Empire?”  
“It might just be a provincial superstition,” he said, scratching at his stubble. “Don’t throw me to the wheat-counters for that.”  
She laughed, gently rolling the tintinnabulum back up in its cloth. “You have a low opinion of Frumentarii, considering you used to be one.”  
“_Because_ I used to be one,” he said.  
“You know what they do for luck in Eorzea instead?” Caelina asked.  
“What,” Nero said.  
“They cross their fingers.” She held her hand up to demonstrate. “One of your superstitions for one of mine?”  
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed, then,” Nero said. “Until you get back.”


	13. We shall die apart, shall we not? That is what you wanted!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #13: Wax**  
Odette de Dzemael & Colette de Dzemael. [Past] Odette de Dzemael/Fray Myste.  
[[Title](http://www.poemswithoutfrontiers.org/Elegie_Desbordes_Valmore.html)]
> 
> Gen.

The moon was a sliver of gold in the sky—barely a slip of a thing, but it had been entirely dark the night before. Odette groped in her sleep-addled mind for the phrase, and could not conjure it. She cast her gaze from the window on the far side of the room. This was not her bedroom, and it was only as she rolled over that she remembered why that would be. The pain lancing up her side told her that she’d probably popped a stitch or two, and she bit back a whimpering cry.

Someone stirred beside her, and a moment later Colette’s voice came in the dark. “Is everything alright?”  
“Fine,” Odette said through her pain-strangled throat. “What’s it called when the moon’s getting bigger?”  
“Waxing phase,” Colette mumbled. She lifted her head. “Why are you asking me astrology questions at this hour?”  
“I don’t know,” Odette admitted. She squinted into the dark to find her twin laid out on a little cot beside her. “Why are you sleeping in here?”  
“Grandpere said you fell on your walk today, and Maman was being just awful. She said you came in crying and went straightaway to bed by afternoon. Did you hurt yourself?”  
Odette sighed. “Some,” she admitted. “I took some medicine to make me sleep, but now I’m awake.”

They laid there in parallel as they had done when they were girls, and sometime more recently when they were adventurers, alone in the world together. Odette willed her breathing to become deep and even, the patterns of sleep, but she could not force herself to match it.

“Colette,” she said. “I ruined his life, Colette.” She laid there, staring at the waxing crescent of the moon, golden as a knight’s eyes, and as distant. There was no answer to her statement, so she posed a question instead. “Why?”

Colette had no answer, and gave none. The only sound in the room was the rustle of cloth, and then her twin settled in the bed beside her, scrunched up next to the bed. She lifted one hand—blessedly cool—to Odette’s forehead, and simply let it rest against the skin a few moments before moving on to brush back Odette’s unbound hair.

“Why am I still thinking about it,” Odette said, a growl of frustration in her voice. She closed her eyes, as though that would be sufficient to block out the sight before her, but there was no real shutter against memory. “Is it worse that I don’t think I should be?”  
“Because,” Colette said, gently stroking her cheek, “you want to make yourself feel worse about it.”  
“I saw him today.”  
“Then of course you’re still thinking about it!”  
Odette sighed. “He hates me.”  
“Maybe so,” Colette murmured, “but if we would die from lack of love we should have perished long since. Both of us.”  
Odette only hummed noncommittally in reply.  
“Leave such sorrows to the moon,” Colette said. “She will be up all night anyway, but you need your rest.”  
Odette reached out to wrap an arm around her sister’s shoulders, and tried to do as she bid.


	14. Who will measure Uffern?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #14: Scour**  
Melloria Hathaar.  
[[Title](https://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/t01.html)]
> 
> Gen.

When it came down to it, life and death were closer still than two sides of the same coin. It was merely a spectrum—aether wound through all things, and it was given to the Hathaar to see to its ebb and flow.

A soul could be sent to Maduin gently, were they deserving; or kept from his embrace should that be needful. But there was nothing gentle about her when Melloria severed her foes from the aether.

_Sickness must be purged,_ they said. And they were right; a scouring was overdue. It was only the targets they were wrong about.


	15. To be flame in the heat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #15: Travail**  
Sidurgu Orl/Warrior of Light.  
[[Title](https://foxstudio.biz/2009/11/09/mongolia-monday-two-poems/)]
> 
> M/X.
> 
> Day 15 was a free/make-up day. I have elected to use these for AUs. In case you haven't noticed, I really love Dark Knight.

The people of Ishgard are in high spirits, for another heretic has answered for his crimes.

The Ishgardian appetite for justice—and blood—has been met this day, another trial by combat concluded. According to one spectator, it was a spectacle for the ages, as the accused wielded a massive sword and worked his dark arts against his foe. In the end, however, he was no match for his opponent, who ran him through to a chorus of cheers. Seeing no need to afford someone who looks more dragon than man a funeral, the Temple Knights mean to dispose of the corpse by leaving it in the Brume. Intrigued by the spectator’s account, you consider seeking out the knights and seeing this draconic terror for yourself.

Kneeling before the body, you spy a crystal, and reach out to claim it. All at once, your body is wracked with shudders, and a strangely familiar voice echoes in your ears. You collapse, and when you open your eyes, you find the man standing before you, hale and healthy. He introduces himself as Sidurgu, and it would seem that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. He gives pause when you tell him of the voice you heard, but before you can continue, a cry from the streets below draws your attention. You turn to leave, but Sidurgu grasps your shoulder and insists that you discuss the “changes” you are undergoing due to touching his crystal.

The license to give vent to your spleen—to punish the wicked and avenge the dead. This is the way of the dark knight, and Sidurgu offers to teach you. You need only to accept his guidance.

* * *

Sidurgu is ready to teach you. You need but to listen.

Sidurgu tells you of the first dark knight—a nobleman of Ishgard who cast off the trappings of his station in order to bring an untouchable man to justice. Too many are cowed by the consequences of such actions, and will never stand against those who would abuse their power, he says. Consider his words as you seek out the source of the earlier scream.

You come upon an old woman, who beseeches you to save her granddaughter—a spirited young woman who was seized by Temple Knights after an altercation. It soon becomes clear that she is not the first girl to be taken under such circumstances, and that the Temple Knights’ intentions are far less honorable than their office would imply. Sidurgu is of the opinion that the girl might survive the ordeal—but he is loathe to leave it to chance. He is resolved, and bids you follow, should you wish to learn aught of the art.

Sidurgu makes for the Tribunal—the very place of his own trial not so very long before. You ask him what he was on trial for, but he rebuffs you—whatever the real answer is, he’s not telling you. Arrested for buying bread indeed. Instead he tells you more about the way of the dark knight.

Rage, pain, suffering—these emotions form the basis of the dark knight’s arts, Sidurgu tells you. When the violence comes, you can draw upon these indignities to return them a hundred times over. Prepare for the worst. There’s no sense in hoping for the best.

They were angry at having their sport taking from them, but it did not take long for that to transmute to fear. Their screams echoed on the stone, and you made of the rectory an abattoir. This is justice of the purely Ishgardian sort—bloody-minded and absolute. You were content to terrify them into silence, but Sidurgu has no trust in their professed honor. They will not speak of what they witnessed … after all, the dead stay dead, and speak no more.

The girl does not linger long afterward. You call after her to ask who screamed your name, and her only answer is “no one.” Eager to be shut of you, she runs off back to the Brume, leaving you alone with Sidurgu.

He senses your hesitation, and reprimands you for being unwilling to do what is necessary. He says he will not ask you to trust him, only to listen and obey. You swallow your uncertainties, and you nod. When the time is right, he tells you, he will be waiting for you where you first met.

* * *

Sidurgu has been waiting.

The voice, Sidurgu tells you, is a dark knight superstition. Some say the voice belongs to someone you are destined to protect, but he tells you also that he doesn’t believe that. He believes the voice is simply the part of yourself you have learned not to hear. To improve as a dark knight, you must learn to listen—not just to him, but to that voice. Communion will serve to teach you. And Sidurgu will show you how to commune. He takes you from the city to Dravania.

“Kill for me,” Sidurgu demands. You wonder if this is because of the way you balked at the Tribunal, and ask him what he means. He says he doesn’t care, so long as it tests you. So long as you are afraid. He wants to watch you master that fear, and you want to show him. You resolve to ask the hunters of Tailfeather for a suitable target.

The hunters of Tailfeather are cowards barely worthy of the name—trappers, perhaps, and even those they regard as outlaws are mere poachers. But they serve at least to tell you of the lair of a she-coeurl nearby that has harried the wild flock.

You are not afraid, and tell Sidurgu of the she-coeurl’s cave. He goes with you, but stands apart. His eyes are hard and hungry. He expects something of you, something unspoken. Show him who you really are.

The she-coeurl is dead, and the stink of her blood is heavy in the air. Your own blood sings in answer, and Sidurgu is laughing.

The weak cannot save themselves, let alone you—a truth you have always known. Vengeance demands strength. You are ready to commune, and Sidurgu is waiting.

Sidurgu takes your bloodied hands in his and begins the rite of communion. The cave is iron and darkness, and you can feel something press against the inside of your skin. A second self, perhaps.

You hear a whisper in the abyss—a restless warrior, moving without respite, never ceasing. When you tell Sidurgu of the sentiment, he claims to understand. Stillness is the province of the dead, and he is ever moving himself. You ask if he knows what you are moving towards, and he says he cannot tell you, but you will understand if you but learn to listen.

* * *

Sidurgu seems pleased to see you.

When Sidurgu asks you if you have heard the voice again, you are forced to confess that you have not. His tone sours then, and you get the distinct impression he is annoyed with your lack of progress. He departs for the Hinterlands.

Perhaps he is not ready to abandon you just yet, because when you catch up with him he simply directs you toward a crazed Sharlayan familiar to make your offering of blood.

You kill the creature, but it is hardly a trial. It is your turn to be disappointed, and your resentment of Sidurgu for assigning you such a pointless task roils in your breast. Good. That will make you ready. Maybe it’ll even satisfy Sidurgu.

Sidurgu embraces you for communion, but the two of you are interrupted by one of the treasure hunters that still pick over the Sharlayan colony like vultures. They plead with you to go and rescue their friends, who have been captured by the goblins’ Blue Hand. Your anger only grows—how dare a stranger foist these burdens off on you? But there is no one else—save Sidurgu, who is eager to see you put an end to the problem, even at risk to life and limb. At least he’s coming with you this time.

Goblins are far better sport than owls, no matter what sort of magical intellect they’ve been imbued with. You give vent to your frustrations at last, and slay one of the Blue Hand. When you look back to Sidurgu for his reaction, there’s a sort of pride in his eyes. Little time to savor victories, though, when that first death only makes your foes angrier. You give yourself to your rage in turn, and it makes you beautiful, and glorious, and bloody.

The treasure hunters do not stick around long enough to thank you. Perhaps the blood-gilded sight of your blade unnerves them.

It doesn’t bother Sidurgu, though, who embraces you anew, and declares at last that you are a worthy pupil. How does it feel, he wonders, to kill something that can beg you for an undeserved mercy? You have no answer to give, but it doesn’t matter. There are no secrets left to you when you commune.

You let him anchor you, pull you into the abyss, and hear your heartbeat like a hammer and chisel, reshaping you from the inside. “Strength is sacrifice,” you are told. Sacrifice of the oldest kind. If the measure of living is in how one moves, it stands to reason one would want to shed their burdens, the restraints that shackle them and slow them down. You hear Sidurgu, but are you listening?

* * *

Sidurgu has been watching you.

Still you remain deaf to the voice, and to Sidurgu. But we’ve come too far to turn back now, so Sidurgu will help you listen. Will make you listen. Only communion will suffice. You will go to the Sea of Clouds, and you will make an offering of blood. A sacrifice of strength.

Sidurgu is just beginning to explain to you the mysteries of the abyss to prepare you for what’s to come when one of those damnable beastmen interrupts. How dare they! At a time like this, prattling on about legendary beasts and dark feathers. But you insist on listening to them, just as you refuse to listen to anything else. Let’s get on with it, then.

At the very least, they’ve offered up a suitable challenge. Legendary beasts indeed. These are Imperial machina—and soldiers besides. No need to stay your hand for them, eh?

You are never more alive than with a sword in your hand and a foe opposite. You kill, and you kill, and you kill, and it’s only when the island is silent and you are spent that you think to number the dead. There are more of them than you thought possible, and you and Sidurgu stand for a time, wild-eyed and gasping for breath. You are beautiful like this—is it possible that Sidurgu is, too?

You have rid yourself of your hesitations at last. You barely need Sid’s help to embrace the abyss—it wells from you to enfold you both, and you know that he is right. Strength is sacrifice, yes, but it is also freedom. The freedom to do what is necessary. To mete out what passes for justice in this cruel world. To embrace and to love the ugliest parts of yourself.

Sid will be waiting.

* * *

Where is Sid?

Sidurgu is not waiting for you in the place where you met. But you can’t believe he would abandon you now. You’ve come so far. Go and see what’s keeping him.

The people of the Brume seem afraid to speak to you, even though your armor is clean and your sword remains in its sheath. They seem equally nervous to speak of Sid. If only they knew all he had done for them … Never mind all that. The grandmother whose girl you saved at least has a civil tongue in her head. She says that when Sid left, he was headed for the Holy Stables.

Holy indeed. The stench of the place is anything but, and you wonder if that’s the birds or the sniveling souls that tend the place. They’ll tell you where Sid is for the pleasure of being rid of you—he’s gone on to Falcon’s Nest, they say.

The knights of the Nest regard you with open suspicion, and more so still when you ask after Sid. A half-dragon with a slab of iron is not exactly a welcome sight in Ishgard, and you wonder briefly why he wears no helmet. But why hide what you really are?

You follow the trail, and it leads to the Convictory. An apt name, given that Sid has condemned every damned nobleman and knight in it to death. White snow is stained blood red, and at the heart of the tempest, a black figure. You think you’d better do something.

Even now, you still don’t understand! You try to protect them—noblemen undeserving of the name; knights without honor. _Them,_ and not Sidurgu, who has taught you everything you know. Who has set you free. Who loves you. You want him to stop, but there’s no stopping now.

Sid wants to know what makes them different from the Imperials you were all too glad to dispatch yourself. There’s no answer you can give that will satisfy him. The voice is no longer coming from the abyss; from within you—the familiar words spill from the man opposite instead.

There is no justice to be had. There is only death, granted in hopes of sparing more death. We are murderers of the foulest kind, and we had better accept the fact sooner rather than later. If you want to save a dozen unworthy souls, you’re going to have to kill the man across from you. If you’re not moving, you’re not living. Move or die, dark knight.

It’s not easy. Sid refuses to make it easy. But you are moving in opposite directions, no matter how much he wanted you to go together. He’s stopped moving, and you know what that means …

There’s a lot to think about now, with your mentor dead. With his last breath he tells you he’s been dead all along—since the man who founded this damned place killed his parents while they fled Imperial oppression. But you don’t think that’s all of what he means. Does it really matter? Can it really matter? He’s dead and you’re alive, though you can hardly countenance what you’ve done. But there’s one thing left to learn, apprentice.

It’s not a sin if I made you do it.


	16. And find me at dawn in a desolate place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #16: Jitter**  
X'shasi Kilntreader & Regula van Hydrus.  
[[Title](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44719/departure-56d223ec25c64)]
> 
> Gen.  
Not canon ... yet.

“Your hand shakes when you hold the gunblade.”  
“No, it doesn’t. And if it did, how could you tell?”  
“I can hear the components rattling around.”  
“It’s heavy!”  
“That it is, and will grow no lighter with time. But I understood you bore a doughtier blade these days.”  
“Heard that too, did you?”  
“And felt it, that first night in the cornfields. Hm. It suits you.”  
“You might be biased, considering _your_ weapon. Have you _seen_ it?”  
“Never.”  
“Poorly phrased. But _he_ called it the Bastard, so you must have some idea.”  
“You’re not going to lead me astray like this, I hope you know.”  
“Why not? I got you to follow me into the corn stalks.”

“I think even if I gave you a lighter weapon, your hand would still shake.”  
“What makes you so sure?”  
“It’s not the physical weight of the thing that troubles your arm. Rather the weight you can’t contend with is emotional.”  
“What are you implying?”  
“I can skip the implications and state it outright if you’d rather: you’re afraid.”  
“Fear and I are close companions. We have been for a long time—even when I still carried the rapier. Don’t you recall?”  
“Yes, I heard the reports. That was a lifetime ago.”  
“For both of us, I suppose. After … well, a long while after Zurvan, I learned to make a weapon of it.”  
“Why can’t you do that now?”  
“Perhaps it wasn’t the tool I’d hoped. Your blade may have broken, but still you spared the people dearest to you by it. Mine remained whole, but …”  
“But you didn’t really protect them. I see.”

“What are you doing?”  
“Handing you back your weapon. I thought that was obvious, girl. Take it.”  
“Fine.”  
“Lift your arm. Ignore the gun for a moment, this is merely about bladework. Turn. No, keep your feet together, I can hear you. Keep turning. Stop. You have just circumscribed the world.”  
“I’m familiar with the theory.”  
“What are you bringing into the circle?”  
“The knowledge that I _can’t_ control everything inside the scope of my blade.”  
“You were never meant to be able to control _everything_ inside the circle. But you certainly can’t control anything beyond it, when it comes to that point.”  
“You can’t possibly be telling me that sometimes things are beyond one’s control.”  
“I am.”

“Is that why your hands shake, too?”


	17. Brought to earth the arrogant brow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #17: Obeisant**  
X'shasi <s>Silverhair</s> Kilntreader.  
[[Title](https://poets.org/poem/dirge-0)]
> 
> Gen.  


She awoke on a plain of basalt—the base of a caldera, X’shasi suspected, looking at the ridges and hills around her and the flames that leapt from every direction. She was sweltering in her uniform jacket, and could feel the trickle of sweat between her shoulderblades.

She heard the sound of chanting, and realized she had more immediate concerns than the heat. Blinking in the dim, she cast her eyes about and found the obsidian bier laden with crystals. So this, then, was the Bowl of Embers—and, soon enough, her grave. Hers and all her squad’s.

The Amalj’aa forced her and the rest of the Immortal Flames to their feet. Between her squadron and Ungust’s co-conspirators, there were perhaps a dozen of them. Not enough to make a go of it, even if they were armed; the Amalj’aa outnumbered them too heavily.

As they herded her toward the obsidian bier, Shasi could better make out their prayers: _Lord of the Inferno, deliver us from our misery!_

Immortal Flames indeed, she thought, unable to help the bitterness that twisted her features. She cast her gaze upward to the darkened sky—the sun was blotted out by unnatural eclipse. Then it seemed almost as though a new star blossomed at its heart, crimson and furious, expanding in a whirl of flames. Heat and aether rippled over the Bowl of Embers, and the supplicants, and the sacrifices. Her eyes watered, and when she blinked her vision clear, what she saw was still more terrible to behold.

X’shasi Silverhair had never been in the presence of a primal before, and no tale could ever have prepared her. The thing was massive—larger than any beast she had chanced to see in the Coliseum, and stranger still by half. Its body was covered in black chitin—or obsidian, perhaps; the glow of flame escaped at the joints and the tips of its terrible horns. It bounded from hill to hill across the caldera, darting back and forth with unnatural speed. When it landed at last in the bowl proper, the stone fractured with an audible crack.

Behind her, the voices of the captives, whispering amongst themselves, each to each, as if any of them could really know: _What happens now?_  
And before her, the Amalj’aa priest made his offering: _We bring before You ignorant savages who know not Your godhead. Scorch their heathen souls with Your cleansing flame, and mark them as Your own!_

Still came the questions, though it had been obvious from the first to X’shasi what would become of them. She chanced to look back, and saw only incomprehension on the faces there—not denial, as was written upon her own brow. How could they not understand, at this late juncture?

The primal spoke, out of a maw like a pit, surrounded on all sides by the jagged shards of his teeth: _Pitiful children of man! By my breath I claim you!_

X’shasi had but one moment to dwell upon her regrets, and they were all things she would never see again: twilight over Thanalan; the mountains of her birth; even Thancred Waters …

It was not flame that Ifrit gouted over them, but aether, pure and blistering blue. She felt it wash over her, tearing at her being, and she threw her arms up by reflex. Her sleeves caught, false flame lapping harmlessly at her skin, and she was so transfixed by it that she could not help but to stare down at her hands.

The chorus of worship rose anew, and if her comrades had not understood the beastmen before, they knew well enough how to offer obeisance to a god incarnate. And yet her mouth remained closed; her head unbowed. The Amalj’aa turned their spears upon her, as though to force her to her knees, but the fact that she yet stood made their hands shake. It unnerved them.

If X’shasi were to be honest, it unnerved her, too.

Ifrit roared his anger at her defiance, and when he spoke again it made nothing clearer: _Thou art of the godless blessed’s number. The Paragons warned of thine abhorrent kind._

She heard the shuffling of feet, the Amalj’aa and the tempered supplicants withdrawing from their master’s wrath. Ifrit stamped a claw into the black stone, and flames, true flames, erupted behind X’shasi, close enough to singe her tail. She understood enough, then: she had been spared the ravages of Ifrit’s blessings, but that would not buy her life alone.

X’shasi did not feel the heat of the flames, but the cold chill of fear. Ifrit meant to face her alone, and she would stand against him—_had to_ stand against him—for the sake of the infinitesimal chance that she would survive; that perhaps someone else would survive along with her. Opposite her was a being of pure terror, born of crystals and spite. At her hand she had nothing but a slender blade and a lattice of crystal. Still, it would be better to die fighting than to perish in the flames of worship.

X’shasi drew her blade, and charged across the kiln to engage.


	18. You're gone away, and I'm in desert

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #18: Wilt**  
X'shasi Kilntreader/Zenos yae Galvus.  
[[Title](https://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/blok/you_are_gone_away.html)]
> 
> F/M.  


Already the hand of spring had seized Ala Mhigo by the throat, dragging it onward into the heat which would elsewhere be called “summer.” Beneath a cage of glass, neglected flowers gave up their breath, perfuming the air with petals and stagnation.

Him too. It was exactly as she had said: death waited all around him, unworthy and afraid. He hated her for consigning him to this place, and more still for taking her leave of him thereafter, but to hate her was at least to _feel something._

Zenos held his breath like a tree in winter, waiting to live again.


	19. And we will all the pleasures prove

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #19: Radiant**  
Solus zos Galvus/Aquila jen Novius / Emet-Selch/WOL.  
[[Title](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44675/the-passionate-shepherd-to-his-love)]
> 
> M/F.  
Aquila jen Novius is a previous incarnation of Caelina Valeria, who would become the Warrior of Light.

He sent no word before him and brought no escort when he came to the Novius home. Like most of the capital homes it was august, its marble facades as gleaming white as winter snows or ivory standards. He had come here but rarely before—far more often to the workshop, which was in a far more modern neighborhood than this.

It had not been so long before that the man calling himself Solus zos Galvus had lived in such a place as this, but his rising station had demanded new accommodations. Still, he could not bring himself to feel nostalgic for this place—whatever charm it might have held paled in comparison to the city of his heart. It did have one point in its favor, however, and it was for her sake that he lifted his hand to knock.

A servant came to the door to greet him a moment later, and his face went pale, bowing deeply. “Your Radiance,” he said. “Forgive me, we were not expecting an Imperial visitation and are quite unready—”  
Solus waved him off, wafting his hand airily. “Spare me your apologies,” he said, almost annoyed. “I wish to speak with Lady Aquila.”  
“Yes! Of course!” The servant all but stumbled over himself in his eagerness to please. “Please do come in,” he added after a moment. His nervousness showed all the way down to his very soul, which nearly jittered out of his flesh.  
Solus inclined his head in the barest fraction of a nod, and stepped into the grand foyer. He allowed himself to be led through the house, his boot heels echoing on the parquet, until the servant bowed once more and ushered him into a drawing room. The hearth was cold, but Solus draped himself across one of the chairs nearest it in any case.  
“I will inform my lady that you await her here,” the servant said.  
Solus barely deigned to acknowledge that with a nod. Then he said, “I will speak to no one else on this visit, so inform them at your peril.”  
“Of course, Your Radiance,” he said. Then he was gone.

Tempting though it was to watch him go, Solus kept his gaze fixed upon the material world, inspecting at leisure the delicate patterns of the floor; the rug underfoot. The wainscoting was elaborately sculpted, as was the grand mantle that surrounded the inert hearth. But perhaps the more captivating detail in the room was the ceiling. Molding and trays decorated the edges, but a large round inset was painted to resemble brilliant day; perfect blue and luminous clouds. He had hated the sky for so long—a hundred lifetimes or more—because even its very color reminded him of all he had lost.

Until he saw it on her.

Approaching footsteps stirred him from his reverie, and he stood, packing away his diffidence for just a moment. His golden eyes watched the door expectantly, and although he kept his gaze anchored to this world he could not help but see her, the color of cloudless infinities, the only color in the world that he loved.

He bowed to her, deeply, the way that one might bow to him; his magitek brace whined softly against his skin as he rose. Her expression was surprised, lids fluttering over eyes of that selfsame blue. Perhaps she had not believed her servant when he had told her that the Emperor awaited her; hers was a skeptical mind. She bowed to him in turn, and her unbound hair—the same silver color that streaked his own—tumbled over her shoulders.

“Your Radiance,” she said. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Is something the matter?”  
Every bit of his unbroken soul cried out to answer _yes,_ but instead he simply shook his head, extending a gloved hand to her. She placed her own in it, and he bent his head to kiss her knuckles. “I wished to speak with you, little more.”  
She laughed. “And that was so urgent that you could not send word to me?” the woman who called herself Aquila asked him. There was no real scolding in her tone.  
“I am showing incredible self-restraint as it is,” Solus said. “I understand your house is not ready for me, and neither are you. Would you walk with me instead?”  
“The gardens are in bloom,” she said.  
He smiled, gently shepherding her hand to his arm. “Show them to me.”

Like most gardens in Garlemald, the Novius collection grew under glass. It was pleasantly warm in the evening air, the lingering heat of the strengthening sunlight still warm upon the stones underfoot. Here and there he could pick out Halmarult’s concepts, plants more ancient than any in this fractured world could know. How odd it was to see plants that had once towered like the spires of Amaurot diminished so far that they were no more than an ornamental border, easily mistaken for grass. How like them was everything else in this world, though this place had come almost halfway into its full once more.

“So then,” Aquila said. “May I inquire again, Your Radiance, as to what moved you to call upon me with such haste?”  
Solus smiled. “I am merely employing the same strategy that has served me so well in the Garlean army,” he said. “When an opportunity presents itself, be ready and take action.”  
She laughed. “Am I then little more than your next conquest?”  
“No,” he said. “When I spoke of my self-restraint earlier, what I meant was this: it was very hard, when I resolved to come here, not to come with bread and candle in hand.”  
She stopped short, regarding him with confusion. “This is all very sudden,” she said.  
Solus shook his head. “Not for me,” he said. “You have questions, I know. I wish to answer them all, but I need first some assurance that such things as I reveal to you remain with you alone.”  
“I have been, I hope, your staunchest ally; your closest collaborator. Our work on the magitek reforms would prove that, I should think.”  
Solus nodded.

Still, he lifted his other hand and snapped his fingers, and for a moment he was once more the sorcerer of eld, weaving a bit of magic to guard her tongue against all he might now reveal. “You have been that,” he said. “And more. My dearest companion in all the world.”  
“Your Radiance,” she breathed.  
“Please,” he said. “I am not merely that lonely sun, seeking now a sky to hold me. When we are alone, I would have you call me by my name.”  
“Solus,” she said then, and that was still not right, but for the moment it was enough.  
He took her hand in both of his own, gazing into those eyes of beloved blue. “With your help, I have achieved so much, and I stand at the threshold of new accomplishment, if I can but first settle certain private aspects.”  
She looked at him, into those golden eyes he had chosen for himself, the tiniest reflection of his being. “What would you have of me?” she asked. There was a tremolo in her voice, and in her soul, but it was not born of fear.  
“You have been my wife in ages past,” he said. “I would never see us part again.”


	20. Thy mark is on me! I am not the same

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #20: Bisect**  
X'shasi Kilntreader.  
[[Title](https://poets.org/poem/suicide)]
> 
> Gen.

It had all seemed clear once: draw a line right down the middle of Shasi’s life, delineating life before the Echo and afterward. One portion was certainly smaller—but weightier, too; more life in those five years than all those before.

Except that she kept cutting, shaving off slivers of time. Life before and after the Vault. After the Word. After the sacking of Rhalgr’s Reach. After Fray. After death, and loss, and sorrow.

When her soul crystal split right down the middle, she wasn’t surprised. She just held it in her hand and let the serrated edge cut her fingers.


	21. Your other sister and my other soul

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #21: Crunch**  
X'shasi Kilntreader & Ryne ("Minfilia").  
[[Title](http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/millay/april/sa-silence.html)]
> 
> Gen.

Even the canopy of the Greatwood could not entirely shield its denizens from the seething sky that shone above. Shafts of light pierced the trees, falling uncaring upon Slitherbough. It seemed brighter still for the darkness from which X’shasi had just emerged. A funeral, of sorts—one of the very few that X’shasi had been allowed to attend, in this violent life she led. Y’shtola would not be long put off from her task, but there were things to be seen to first.

Minfilia’s eyes were turned skyward, a gentler light dappling her cheeks. She should be playing somewhere, X’shasi thought. Then again, by the time Shasi had seen her fourteenth summer herself, the time for play had been behind her.

Still, Shasi had heard more than a little and a bit about the cell—comfortable, but a cell nevertheless—where Minfilia had lived for a decade, never enjoying the simple pleasures of leaves crunching underfoot or delighting in the way a rain puddle reflected the world above in ghostly echo. She should have been carefree; a happy child, and she never really had.

But there were no carefree children on the First. Amh Araeng had taught her that harsh lesson.

“Minfilia,” she said softly.  
Those eyes—the selfsame blue as Shasi’s own, though far more radiant—turned toward her. “What is it?” she said. “Can I help?”  
“I’d like a word before we join the others, if you have a moment.”  
“Of course,” Minfilia said, and Shasi had to restrain herself from the impulse to offer her her hand.  
Instead they found a quiet niche, its shade softened somewhat by the light of blue candles, and Shasi perched upon a seat, tapping her fingers nervously against the lip. “You’re not her,” Shasi said softly.  
“Thancred knows that, as do the others.”  
“I wonder if you do,” Shasi said.  
“Am I not doing a good job?” Minfilia wondered, her brow wrinkled and lip trembling. “I can train harder—I won’t get hurt next time—”  
“You are a child,” Shasi said softly. “I was older than you are now before I became an adventurer, and it was later still that anyone thought to call me a hero. Even the woman they want you to be was only a girl at fourteen.”  
“But there isn’t time to wait,” Minfilia said. “I know I was only ever a poor substitute for you, but I—”  
“You’re not!” Shasi said, with a force that surprised even herself. She could see the wide-eyed shock on the girl’s face, and she sighed. “You’re not.” It came out more gently the second time. “Forgive me,” Shasi said. Her eyes closed a moment. “I was in your position once,” she admitted. “The first time I met one of the heroes of Carteneau, he got the impression I resented him. And perhaps I did. Certainly I felt like the world might have preferred _him_ to me. I was not wearing my inherited mantle well then.” She opened her eyes. “I am not his shadow, and you are not mine.”  


“What would you have me be, then?” Minfilia asked, lifting a hand to tuck back a lock of golden hair.  
“It isn’t my decision to make,” Shasi said softly.  
“It would be so much easier if I could just … be _her,_” Minfilia said. “I wish she were here instead of me, and Thancred does, too.”  
“He doesn’t—”  
“He does! There’s no sense in lying. You’re not very good at it, and I have the advantage in sniffing you out. You wish she were here, too.”  
“All else being equal, yes,” Shasi admitted. “If I could have her here, I would, at least for his sake. But not at the cost of another. She feels the same way.”  
“How can you know that?”  
“The Echo does more than render us immune to the corruption of sin eaters and false gods,” Shasi said softly. “It allows us to see the past, and the secrets that lie in the hearts of men. Among other things, it would seem.”  
“Then you know what he will not tell me.”  
“He wants to, I think,” Shasi said softly, “but has not the words. That is the way of things, sometimes. Who could say if I would fare better, were I to come across someone in this place that I loved as he loved her?”  
“What was she to him?” Minfilia asked. “He has told me of her deeds, but …”

Shasi sighed, and watched the way the candles rippled a moment. “She was a girl of ten when her father died,” Shasi said. “I was there, though I knew it not. There was a parade, and one of the beasts meant for the coliseum got loose. Her father was among the casualties, and Thancred blamed himself—perhaps blames himself _still;_ it would not surprise me—for failing to fell the beast before it killed him. He was … sixteen, perhaps, barely a man himself in most parts of our world. It was another bard, F’lhammin, who assumed the role of mother. Thancred, I think, was more an elder brother to her, and her staunchest supporter.”  
“I’ve never had a brother,” Minfilia said.  
“Me either,” Shasi admitted. “When I was young I thought I had, and I hated my mother for taking me away from them, but as it turns out perhaps I have always been an only child, and I understand the reasons why she left. Besides, I suppose his role has changed now.”  
“It does not rest easily with him.”

Shasi looked at the way Minfilia folded her hands in her lap, and some foreign pain surged in her chest. She bit it back, allowed it no outlet; let it cycle through her until it commingled with the abyss that dwelt in her heart—black and red; love and pain.

“Why wouldn’t he just leave me with Urianger?” Minfilia asked, a note of pleading in her voice. “He could just send me the ammunition, or … or something; I know he wanted me ready for the war upon the sin eaters, but he doesn’t want me and I can’t help him.”  
Those words lanced through Shasi as though physical things; it was a difference of kind and not degree, she could see at once, but the hurt was the same. Perhaps the answer was, too. “He would never forgive himself,” Shasi said softly. “Should anything befall you that he could have forestalled by his presence … much like the goobue at the parade, he would take that burden of responsibility unto himself. Still, better him than you; he is a man grown, in the end.”  
“What cause has he for such guilt?”  
“None, so far as I know,” Shasi said. “He is given to such self-recrimination, but there are few people I consider to be as good a person as Thancred, and … most of them are here.”  
“Have you ever told him so?” Minfilia asked.  
“I … have not the words,” Shasi said softly. “Nor do I think he would believe me, even were I sure it was my place to speak them.”

Minfilia only looked at her for a long while, and Shasi turned her head rather than face those crystal-blue eyes.

“You must love him very much, to know him so well,” Minfilia said.  
“Perhaps I did once,” Shasi murmured, and lapsed into silence a moment. She cleared her throat. “So now you know what drives him,” she said. “As best I can tell it to you.”  
“And what drives you?” Minfilia wondered. “How did you become such a hero?”  
“I never wanted to be—” Shasi began, and could not help but think of Ardbert. “… to be a Warrior of Light, much less of Darkness. I wanted to help people; to protect the weak and work for the common good, but … until I met Thancred, I never thought I would do great things. Just good ones, where I could. And now …”  
“And now?”

Shasi leveled her gaze at the girl’s once more. “I don’t know how to speak to you about this,” Shasi said. “I want to protect you, as the child you ought to be allowed to be, but … I wish also to do you the dignity of addressing you as a peer.”  
“I have little innocence left to spare,” Minfilia said.  
“Few do here, I’m finding.” Shasi sighed. “The truth is, I barely want this life. Were it given to me to do it all over again … I would, but not because this was my ambition or my desire. There is a part of me—more real than you can know—that wishes to run away from all this. And much of me resents being here.”  
“But Urianger’s vision—”  
“Is but one of many futures, or there would be no point to our actions here. Were fate so undeniable, we would not fight so fiercely. I yet believe there would have been another way. We would have known enough to thwart the catalyst of their calamity. Someone … an ally … was working toward that purpose already, ere the Exarch ever called us hence. That sin I will not forgive so easily,” Shasi said, quiet but vehement.  
“What sin?”  
“He robbed me,” Shasi said, “not only of those whom I fought so hard to protect, but of my _choice._ That is unforgivable to me,” Shasi said, “as it would be unforgivable to me should the Minfilia of the Source take your body from you perforce. As it would be to me were you to join this war under duress.”  
“I don’t understand,” Minfilia said softly.  
“It is a choice I make, over and over,” Shasi said, “to be their Warrior of Light. Perhaps I could have refused the Exarch, and bid him find another Warrior of Darkness … but I see now who that burden would have fallen to, and I cannot permit that. It must be me, for the same reasons as ever.”  
“Because you choose it?” Minfilia said.  
“Because if I choose it,” Shasi said, “no one else has to. Least of all you.”


	22. This red gown will make a shroud

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #22: Detritus**  
Fray Myste & X'shasi Kilntreader.  
[[Title](https://www.bartleby.com/131/12.html)]
> 
> Gen.
> 
> Posted on day #29, a free/make-up day. I have elected to use these for AUs. In case you haven't noticed, I really love Dark Knight.  
(Remember when we thought Shadowbringers might be a time travel expansion?)

The voice that had hammered inside her head all those moons had been right about some things: _if history must be unwritten, let it be unwritten._ But there were far more than twin dooms to correct—seven calamities had befallen the star, and she had unmade them, one by one, tugging at the threads of time.

It diminished her, little by little; each was harder than the last. Each chiseled away at her soul in a way she had not known to expect. The world grew dimmer and dimmer with every victory—or perhaps it was more accurate to say that life and light were distributed more thinly.

And then there was the eighth task, most distant from the present she had come from. That first faltering step on the road to rejoining. The Thirteenth loomed, swollen with darkness that was hers to turn back. By then she was no stronger than the champions of that smothered world, but she was far harder; more experienced. And besides, she had slain Igeyorhm before—or since. It made no nevermind.

This last task would sever the final thread of fate that bound her to the star that had borne her. She could not save the time she had come from, not without abandoning it, but she would leave it a better world however she could. There was but one thing left her to do in this world, and it was this.

“Fray,” she said.  
_What is it?_  
“It’s time to say goodbye.”  
No answer came in words, but she could feel a sense of confusion and unease within her breast. Part of that was hers, she knew, but the greater portion belonged to another. She felt it distantly, as if across a chasm; if not for her blessings, perhaps she would not have felt it at all.  
“Where I go hereafter, you won’t follow. You can’t follow. I can’t take you with me. Even now I can hardly carry you …”  
_Look me in the eye when you’re telling me this,_ Fray said. It might have been a demand once, but it was something softer now. Shasi answered him only with a nod.

Her animus had weakened with the thinning of her soul, but her control was fine as ever. She put a hand over her chest and closed her eyes. The sound of breath as she filled her lungs and emptied them focused her. She could feel her heartbeat slow despite the anxieties that roiled within her. She would be alone; the very thought was abhorrent to her, but strength was sacrifice. To lay everything aside for one goal—wasn’t this all she had trained for? Shasi stretched a hand out, as she had done so often when she and Fray had communed.

“Listen to my voice,” he said. His touch was like breath upon her skin, warm but immaterial, and she focused on it, on the remembered sound of his voice, trying to pour herself out for him. But when she opened her eyes, he was still phantasmal.  
Shasi shook her head. “This is the limit of my ability now,” she said. “I’m sorry.”  
Fray looked at her, his gold eyes wan as the waning moon. “What are you planning?” he asked. “You’ve built a wall inside yourself that makes it impossible to know.”  
“I’m going to go save you,” she said. “Before you disappear.”  
Fray snorted. “What about saving yourself? I thought I’d taught you better than this.”  
“There’s no way this ends with you and I together!” Shasi shook her head. “And you wanted to live so, so badly. If I’m going to lose you anyway, I might as well at least give you this.”

“You don’t listen,” he said. “You never listen.”  
“No, Fray,” she said, “I _do_ listen. You accused me once of ‘convenient heroics.’”  
“Yes.”  
“This is not convenient,” Shasi told him. There was nothing she wanted more than to keep Fray with her as she went into darkness, but she looked at his flickering form and shook her head. “But justice demands no less.”  
He closed his eyes, turned his face away. “I’ll never know you,” he said. “If you do this. We’ll never meet.”  
“We’ll meet,” Shasi promised him. “Once.”  
“You’ll lose the art.”  
“I might lose the stone,” she said. “What makes a dark knight? Is it the sword? The stone? I can find those things, if I look carefully.” She pursed her lips. “_If._ But I don’t think that’s what makes a dark knight.”  
“You’ve worn the black for a year and now you want to make grand philosophical statements about the nature of the dark knight?” He laughed, but there was no amusement in it.  
“I had a very good teacher,” she said, “and an incredibly thorough education. What makes a dark knight, then, Fray?”  
“An attunement to your Darkside. The ability and the will to protect your charge, even in defiance of social norms and orders.”  
Her blue eyes sought his. “I will still have those things,” she said.

Then she said, “Do you remember when you were helping me to hear the voice in my heart, at the beginning of my training?”  
“How could I forget?” Fray asked. His hands were balled into fists, but she heard no creak from the leather, and nothing from the armor he wore. He had become less and less real over the course of her adventure.  
“Remember when I thought it was you?” She laughed.  
“It was _you,_” he said.  
“A dark knight has the right to choose her charge,” Shasi told him.  
“Dark knights aren’t meant to rely on anyone,” Fray protested.  
She lifted her shoulders, fixing him with a resigned smile. “You never said that when I relied on you,” she pointed out. “I asked you once who protected us, and you said the answer was nobody—but when I needed you … _every time_ I needed you, you were there.” She glanced away a moment, pressing her lips together briefly. “Was I your charge, Fray?”  
He didn’t answer for a long time. Then he said, “Yes.”  
“It’s your turn to be mine,” Shasi told him. “What makes a dark knight is the willingness to sacrifice everything to protect your charge—the one person you esteem above all others.” She turned her smile on him. “In defiance of orders. Even yours, Fray.”

“It’ll hurt,” he said.  
“I’m not afraid of pain,” she said. “It’s like you said … I look for burdens to take on. It’s the only reason I’m this good at this.”  
“Not you.”  
Shasi shook her head. “You won’t even know I’m gone.”  
“Maybe that’s worse!” he snarled.  
“Maybe,” she agreed. “But I’ll carry that for you.”  
“Why?” he asked.  
“You know why,” Shasi said, feeling suddenly abashed. She stretched her arms out toward the shade.  
He stepped into them, warm as a bed only recently made empty. “Will you still remember me?” Fray wondered.  
“All my life.”

He dissipated back into her then, and she closed her eyes, focusing on his lingering presence—two souls in one body—a vessel that had been meant to hold so much more, once. But she did not feel empty; all that headroom was filled with resolve, and she held fast to it as she adjourned to the Lens, there to manipulate the focus that would cast her back in time.

The gelid winds of Ishgard raked through her silvery hair. Ahead loomed the Arc of the Worthy, and beyond that the Steps of Faith. It took her but a moment to orient herself, and then she was hustling across the plaza. The stairway that descended into the Brume was not so far, and when she reached it she could see a figure, dark against the rime-white stone, far below her.

Something surged in her heart at the sight of him; even a hundred yalms away and from behind she knew him. She would, always. When she went to her grave, alone at last and for eternity, she would know him. At the end—or the beginning—of time.  
But for now, she said, “This is goodbye, then.”  
_Goodbye, Shasi,_ Fray said. _Good luck._  
“I love you more than I can say.”

She waited for the figure to pass, and then she dropped a hand on his shoulder and said, for the last time, “Fray.”


	23. And where her glances fall, there cities burn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #23: Parched**  
Menelaus, the denizen of Amaurot who will one day be X'shasi Kilntreader.  
[[Title](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521280478/)]
> 
> Gen.

Amaurot was far behind him now, and the Convocation with it. Menelaus had heard the reports—so too had they all—but it had not prepared him for the reality. Of all cities, his was the greatest, but he had come across the sea for love of a woman, and found only parched earth and burning spires.

A terrible keening filled the air, a sound that disrupted creation itself. Its discordant note stoked the unease in his heart. Whether or not the companion he had come for followed him home, this sight surely would—in memory first, and then in truth.


	24. A look all veiled in blue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #24: Unctuous**  
Odette de Dzemael/Aymeric de Borel  
[[Title](http://www.poemswithoutfrontiers.org/Fleur_denfance.html)]
> 
> M/F.

She could at least walk to the tea room under her own power. That was a mercy, though Odette still favored the ankle she had twisted some few days before. Still, she dared not wear white as she was accustomed to, dressed instead in a wine-red gown that might not show so obviously if her wounds reopened. As was their wont.

Perhaps instead it was her wont to reopen them.

The servant who announced her was too obsequious for her liking—but then everyone in the house was either unctuous or callous, sometimes by turns. Maman’s influence, she did not doubt. Besides, there was no need to bow and scrape; Odette knew who her caller was. She had only had the one visitor throughout all of her convalescence. Guillaume had written, and a few had sent flowers, but none of them came in person, though she had briefly allowed herself to entertain such hopes about Rielle.

Aymeric de Borel stood, hands clasped gently behind his back, always attentive but somehow more alive when he looked upon her. “Odette,” he said, with such warmth that it could have melted the frost from windowpanes even in Halone’s own moon.  
“Lord Speaker,” she greeted him in turn, and if he was stung by her formality he did not show it.

Instead he merely crossed to pull out her chair, offering a hand she refused to take as she settled into it. Odette dismissed the servant with a wave. Winter sunlight streamed in through the windows, glittering on his earring and the pin in his cravat. For a moment she was abashed; the fullness of her splendor was too much to endure getting on with while she was yet recovering, but he had seen her with sweat upon her brow and poppy’s milk in her veins. The thought was less comfort than she hoped, reflecting on it.

“I am pleased to see your recovery progressing,” he said.  
“Not as swiftly as I’d hoped,” she admitted. “Nor the rest of the world, I imagine.”  
His smile was pained, and for a moment Odette thought he would ask her to come and stay with him again. She had considered the offer—not the first time he made it, but the second or third, when she remembered what troubled her in this house. She even had the sense that in some fevered state she had said yes, but perhaps that was only a dream. If she had, he had waited for her to acknowledge it first, and it bore no mention for her. He spoke not, in the end. Instead his fingers brushed a small box on the table, wrapped in glossy blue paper.

The maid came then with the tea service, and laid saucer, cup, and spoon before them. Aymeric smiled gently at her. “I’ll pour,” he said. “Thank you.”  
“Of course,” she said, her tone syrupy. She curtsied to him, and then to Odette. “My lady.” Then she withdrew, never turning away, and Odette found herself annoyed all over again.  
“Why do they do that?” she wondered. Aymeric chuckled a little to himself, and it was only then she realized the thought had escaped her lips.  
He took the teapot in his hands, and tipped it to pour a measure into her cup. As he poured for himself, he said, “You are a hero a hundred times over, and nearly gave your life in the defense of Ishgard and her allies. Why would they not?”  
“It’s not as though they’re sincere,” Odette noted with dismay, stirring a lump of sugar into her tea.  
“Why wouldn’t they be?” he asked, drizzling birch syrup into his cup.  
Odette rolled her eyes. “Maman is not happy,” she said. “She’s concerned about the scar, of course.”  
“So she would rather a picturesque daughter than a valiant one?”  
She could not help but laugh at that. “Always. Don’t you recall how unhappy she was when I chose to pursue service with the Temple Knights?”  
“I had hoped that might have changed, given everything else that has.” Aymeric frowned.  
“Estellise de Dzemael does not change,” Odette said; “she merely waits for the world to conform to her expectations.”

She could feel his concern, and the resignation that challenged it, though it would not yield. That was her gift, and her curse; she wanted to flee the room rather than abide one moment more in his pity. But she swallowed the impulse with her next sip of tea, and with it went her own reactions. It was unseemly for her to be afraid. She could not be angry instead, nor cold—it would never be winter in her heart for him, whatsoever she might wish—and so she elected instead to be greedy.

“But what’s this you’ve brought me?” she prompted, gesturing to the package beside his hand.  
“Ah,” he said. “A gift.” He offered it up to her, and she set her cup and saucer aside a moment to set it before her. She picked open the white ribbons and carefully unfolded the blue paper, laying it aside—whole but creased—to look upon his gift.

In one small box she found a lacquered wooden pen and a half-dozen replacement nibs; another held a triad of small bottles of ink and a block of sealing wax. The last wooden box was large enough to hold letters, and it nearly did—envelopes and stationary folded to nest neatly. Letters in waiting. Atop them was a small silver charm. It looked like an envelope, and would fit neatly on her chatelaine. She opened it to find stamps, printed with etchings of flora from the Churning Mists. She laid them out in front of her. There she espied the Seventh Heaven blossom, and there a kupo nut, and a cloud mallow. Iceheart’s Tears, too, and for a moment Odette longed to stand once more in the shadow of Zenith. Anywhere but here.

“What is this?” she asked, looking from it to him, then back down again as she folded the stamps back up into their accordion and tucked them away in the envelope charm once more.  
“It seems to me,” Aymeric said, “that your convalescence is drawing toward its end and you will soon resume your adventures. When I consulted your sister on the matter, she told me that you possessed no implements to write letters on your journeys, and it was my hope that in providing that which is needful, you might be encouraged to send word now and then.”  
Her sister. Of course. Her younger twin had said this to him. It was not a shortage of paper that had stayed her hand; she kept a logbook, after all. But it seemed far too cruel to tell him outright that she did not write because she simply did not wish to. Not when he had made his yearnings plain with this gift. Odette considered what she might say in reply, taking up her tea to sip it. She looked across the table and found Aymeric’s blue eyes intent upon her own. She came to no conclusion even as she stretched out her arm once more, teacup delicately in hand.

She dropped it. The sound of porcelain shattering echoed in the room. She never looked away from Aymeric’s face.

Footsteps out the door presaged someone’s coming, and only then did she remember to dread her mother’s displeasure. Surely she would not be happy to find the family china in shards, and Odette knew a pang of fearful regret.

Aymeric reached across the table, setting his cup on her vacant saucer, and knelt beside the table. He was there when the maid came in, looking concerned.  
“What happened?” she asked. “Is everything alright?”  
“Merely an accident,” Aymeric said, in that even way of his. “Please forgive my clumsiness.”

They knelt there on the floor, picking white shards from grey stone, and Odette looked on dispassionately. Aymeric glanced at her once or twice, but she gave him nothing. She had nothing to give. He had secured her escape from consequences with his lie, perhaps, and yet something still ached in her heart. She dared say nothing, lest she confess her crimes.

Soon the mess was gone, and the maid too, and the rest of the tea service. They sat there at an empty table, his wishes laid out between them.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. It was barely a question, a gentle entreaty to unburden herself. “What could have possessed you to do that?”  
She had an answer, but could not give it—certainly not while she looked into his eyes. “What would you do,” she wondered, “if you returned to Saint Finnea’s cloisters and set all the swans free, but one swan insisted upon remaining? She would eat of your table, should you offer, and shelter beneath the eaves there, and swim in the lake, but she would always peck at you every time you came near?” She stacked the wooden boxes in front of her, looking down at her hands as she worked. “She doesn’t know why, and you have done nothing wrong, but whenever you see her, she pecks you. Wouldn’t you give up, eventually?”

Aymeric said nothing for a long time. Then he said, “Well—does she love me?”  
“Her love for you is an agony.”  
His brow knit; his face crumpled. “Why should love ever be agony?”  
It seemed a naive question coming from him—had he never suffered for love of her? “Do you love me still?”  
“Yes,” he said at once.  
She shook her head. “It is torment enough that you love me, and torment twice over that I love you. I wish I did not; these feelings are unwelcome to me. But it is not because you are not a good man—rather you are the best of all men, and should be free to choose someone better suited to your happiness.”  
He looked upon her then with perplexity, though beneath it she could feel his joy. “You have not spoken of this before,” he said. “What moves you to speak now?”  
“I have been reminded much of late of my own deficiencies,” she said.  
“In what way?”

Odette considered a long moment. When she spoke, it was bluntly: “Fray and I chanced to meet again. And Gaius van Baelsar is in love with my twin sister.”  
Aymeric pressed his lips into a thin line. “I knew that the Black Wolf lived, having been briefed on the subject, but I remain uncertain what connects these two matters.”  
“It was not a happy reunion,” Odette said. “Neither of them were happy reunions. Knowing me seems to have done Fray Myste more harm than good, and I cannot see how it would be otherwise for you. And the legatus of the XIVth—though he claims to have shed that mantle; as soon part a wolf from his pelt, I think; it would go more easily.” She cleared her throat. “Van Baelsar is in love with my twin sister. We shared him once, more than gladly. Did you know this? Did I ever deign to tell you? Well, see me now for what I am.” She shook her head. Aymeric seemed on the verge of speech, but she could brook no forebearance lest she lose her nerve. So she continued, “I no longer feel comfortable with that. When last he was made to endure my affections, it felt like an intrusion where I am no longer invited. It is, though I wish it not, an affront to me. But in truth it is only the most natural consequence. Colette is a far more comforting person than I. So far as I know she has left no wounds in her wake like the ones I dealt Fray Myste, who loved me once and no longer.

“But on due reflection,” Odette continued, “what would I do, really, if he were in love with me? If _either_ of them were in love with me? Would it be welcome to me in the least? I was forced to admit that it would not, and my envy of the love they bore others was simplest foolishness. After all, was I not tormented enough by the knowledge of the love you bore me—that you bear for me still? Why should I compound that unhappiness, or wish it upon any other person?” She turned her gaze from his face; from those blue eyes and his moue of concern. Outside the window she watched the sleet drive from the heavens into the city, and longed to feel its sting against her skin. “It gave me no great joy to consider it, and I decided that my feelings, unwholesome and unwelcome as they are, should be conveyed to you nevertheless.”

His hand brushed hers; covered it. She stared out the window. “Of course,” he said. “That all sounds very much like nothing.”  
“Oh, do not comfort me now!” Her gaze snapped back toward him. “This is nothing; you have agreed, and it is beneath you to debase yourself by taking my hand!”  
Aymeric winced, and lowered his eyes. He lifted his hand and instantly she missed its weight and warmth. “’Twas a poorly considered jest,” he said, but did not reach for her again. “I do not think it is nothing, for nothing you feel is insignificant to me. Least of all this. If my attentions are a torment to you, I will at your word withdraw and never mention my feelings again.” His throat bobbed, as though he too sought to swallow his sorrows as she had done so often. Aymeric looked upon her face once more, and said, “It has been my greatest hope that I might one day prove worthy of your love, but if that love does you harm, then I cannot wish for it. Your happiness and comfort are much more dear to me.”

Odette looked down at their hands, ilms and an entire world apart. “The swan will not leave the monastery of her own will,” she said. “It falls to you to turn her out.”  
Aymeric said, “If your affections are elsewhere laid, of course I shall not interfere. My greatest wish for you then would be that you might be recognized for the extraordinary woman you are.”  
“I don’t love him!” Odette said, balling her hand into a fist. “I have never loved Gaius van Baelsar, and I am not certain I ever loved Fray Myste! Gaius is in love with my sister—and there is no part of me that wishes for his love, even were I worthy of it.”  
Aymeric began, “I see—”  
“She is a better match for him,” Odette said. “And Sidurgu a better match for Fray, and Lucia a better match for you. Even Estinien—I sought so tirelessly to save Estinien not simply for my sister’s sake but for yours. Meager though his comforts are, they would certainly serve you better than mine.”  
“Lucia is a fine woman,” Aymeric said. “And Estinien is a dear friend. Still, I do not love them as I love you.”  
Odette let her hand fall to the table, disarmed of her anger. Of every shield she could conjure to mask her true feelings. What was left? Sorrow, and longing, and uncertainty—none of them becoming on a lady. “Why not?” she said. Her voice was plaintive. “It has been two years since we said goodbye, and since I revealed to you the unworthiness of my heart. Of my behavior. Why not lay your affections elsewhere? I had thought perhaps you would … stop, someday. I still think you will.”  
He looked upon her with naked wonder, innocent as a child’s, and as all-enduring. “What could ever persuade me to stop?”

“Your peers will not be kind to you,” Odette said. It was the first of the old arguments. “I know my own reputation.”  
“You are a hero of the realm, and people love you more than you can know.” Aymeric lowered his gaze to their hands once more. “And those that do not make no difference to me. I was a bastard adopted by a dowager, and now I am as much a patricide as a hero. But shame has never come to live under my roof.”  
It seemed inconceivable to her, an alien world to her own. What came next? “I would not make a good wife to you.”  
“We need not marry,” he said, “if that is not your wish. I would gladly forego that honor for the greater one of having you by my side.” That was what he always said, but as with the last answer he had more to add that was new to her: “What makes a good wife?”  
She looked at him, frowning as she considered the question. “Composure,” she said; a lady could never be allowed to be as angry nor as sad as she had proven herself before him. “And deference, and all those qualities I lack.”  
He smiled a little, though the expression was rueful. “Composure you have,” he told her. “You have shown it in far greater trials than Ishgardian society can conceive of, much less offer. And I do not want your deference anyway; I never have. What I have admired all my life in you is how unafraid you are to speak for your convictions. To knock me back when I am being foolish.”  
“You are never foolish,” Odette said.  
“I am more a fool than you imagine,” he said. “But I want you for an equal.”  
“Even if we were to wed, I am far too old and much too busy to give you children,” Odette told him, the last of all her arguments—and the one she never won.  
He laughed. The sound was gentle, warm, as though it was a comfort to him to return at last to the end of this road. “Should you want them, we can adopt. How could I ever object to such a thing?”

He looked at her then, and turned his hand over to offer it up to her. “Do you know why the swan always wants to peck me?”  
It was such a sudden change of topics that it took her a moment to recall her own earlier metaphor. “No,” she said.  
“It is because she’s afraid,” Aymeric said. “And there is much to fear, especially in a life as perilous as yours. But I want you to feel—and to know—that you are safe with me.”  
She looked at that gentle hand, waiting for her to take it. “Why?” she asked. “Why not put the swan out of the monastery? If you would but chase her away, she would never trouble you with her presence again.”  
He shook his head, the motion just barely visible in the periphery of her vision. “I faced once the reality of a world bereft of you,” he said. “I would never choose it.”  
There was so much being offered to her with that waiting hand. It seemed impossible, thinking on it. And yet … as much as it would betray her innermost feelings—a cardinal sin, her mother had taught her at a young age—didn’t she want to take it?

Odette laid her hand across his palm. “I can’t stay in Ishgard all the time,” she said. “I can’t put this life before my duties.”  
“I know. And I would never ask,” Aymeric said. “But if you can spare a moment, you are always welcome.” He folded his fingers over hers, and sat there, hand-in-hand with her.


	25. I knew her for a little ghost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #25: Trust**  
X'shasi Kilntreader & Lensha Hathaar.  
[[Title](https://poets.org/poem/little-ghost)]
> 
> Gen.

Perhaps even Fray’s judgment was not infallible. After all, he had bridled at the idea of doing favors for the Ondo, but when she had returned to the Tempest and seen the spires reaching up from the seabed, she had wept. She had remained there long after, and returned there too often. Whatever aetherial anchor the Crystarium offered her, she had rejected it, and found it easier to return to the sea.

Perhaps she was waiting for something. The second end to this lost world, maybe; she had expected it to vanish like morning dew or a dream upon waking. But Amaurot stood, and its people with it. And perhaps she was searching for something. The shades were happy enough to tell an eager child some histories and lecture her on a few customs, but invariably she reached the bounds of their knowledge.

Hythlodaeus would know the truth.

That thought circled the bounds of her skull like an eager predator, and every time it resounded she could not help but be reminded of the last man to think it. But Hythlodaeus did not appear and offer her answers, and even if she created a shade of Hades to walk this city—after all, she’d done such a thing before, and wasn’t that chilling?—he would have no knowledge she was not already possessed of.

Sitting atop the archway crowning the capital building, Shasi considered it anyway. There was always the possibility that she was choosing to ignore such things as she already knew, and the technique would bring her subconscious to the fore. It was a dangerous gambit, of course, and she wrestled with it, and with the binary decision to tell Urianger of her plans or to tell no one. It was Urianger, after all, who was most familiar with the technique, though she had never owned her part in it. To tell him would require an accounting for Myste and a confession that she was responsible—and in some way eager to do it again. Urianger had been patient with the impulses her grief had driven her to, being more than familiar himself, but she was not at all certain his trust extended so far.

There was a flicker of white in the streets below. It startled Shasi from her thoughts, and she tracked it with her eyes a long few moments—just a white point upon stone streets, little different from the black figures of the Amaurotines.

She came down the same way she had come up—by hand, feeling the grit of the facade beneath her fingertips. It was a long climb, and her heart was in her throat all the while, but it was not really the fall she feared. The last time she had seen _him,_ after all, he had tried to kill her. And still she scrambled down the side of the building, pausing on the balcony over the portico to scan the streets again. The white figure—there—smaller than the titans who walked these streets in their robes of black.

She could have just gone back inside and taken the elevator back down to the ground floor, but it felt dangerous to take her eyes off him even for a moment, so when she climbed down onto one of the pillars, she pulled herself around it so that she climbed its inside, looking out over the city.

It’s dangerous to climb so high, little one! one of the shades admonished.  
“I’m coming down,” Shasi protested, and vaulted herself back to the street. Her bootheels hit the stone, and she hustled away, black robe fluttering behind her.

Shasi had never been much a rogue, but discretion was better than haste now, lest more of those well-meaning shades henpeck her on the approach and give her away. To the Polyleritae District, then—which Shasi could not help but think an oddity. He had never been so concerned with such things before. But a fluttering of white in a sea of black robes was not hard to track, even if the lion’s share of her experience had come from tailing beasts for the hunt clans and not Echo-blessed emissaries.

The figure rounded a corner, and Shasi hustled to catch up, but when she came around the edge of the building she found the white-robed figure staring back at her. She stopped short, hands frozen at her sides.

“I thought you were …”  
“Elidibus?” Lensha asked. “Yes. If I were, what would you have sought? Answers or the fight?”  
Shasi frowned. “I know which I am likelier to get.”  
Lensha’s gaze swept over her, scrutiny sharp as knives. She smoothed a hand over her own white robes. “But it does not stop you trying, does it.”  
Shasi lifted a hand to her chest, rubbing lightly at her breastbone. Whatever fragile hope of peace the Emissary had offered once had broken like her rib cage beneath the force of his blade stroke. “What are you doing here?”  
Lensha only looked at her flatly. “This is my city,” she said. “As you well know.”

Shasi shook her head. “How could I have known that?”  
“Because it was yours once, Menelaus.”  
The name was unfamiliar to her, and yet it resonated. “Menelaus,” she repeated, feeling the shape of it in her mouth.  
“Or shall I call you by your title instead? You did abdicate,” she said, testily.  
“What are—what do you mean? How could you know all this?”  
Lensha looked at her a while longer, and Shasi understood then the expression that all those masks hid. It was patronizing and a little discomforting, to be looked upon as an ignorant child. “Sappho told me,” she said, as though it were obvious. “Though if you do not recognize your own name, I doubt you would recognize hers. Let us call her, instead, Igeyorhm.”

Shasi only stared at Lensha in return. It was quite the admission, especially given this was the very first time Lensha had deigned to tell her about herself. “What should I call _you_?” Shasi wondered.  
“Lensha Hathaar,” replied the other woman.  
“But you know my name!”  
Lensha only tilted her head briefly. “Be grateful for that,” she said. “Why did you come to this city of ghosts?”  
“For answers,” Shasi said.  
“So that is why your hand never went to your blade. I see. Well, hero, I wish you the joy of finding a satisfactory end.”  
Shasi’s expression turned dubious, the mirror to Lensha’s own. “I doubt that.”  
“Nothing ever ends,” Lensha said instead. “We walk the same circles, lifetime after lifetime. We think the same thoughts. All that we have done we will do over and over again. You will seek closure until your breath leaves your lungs, leaving others to seek it after you.”  
“You came here the same as I,” Shasi said.  
“Yes,” Lensha said. “To lose it later, I must have it now. Do you see?”

She didn’t, not at all, but that was always the way of things with Lensha. “Tell me everything you know,” Shasi said, not a demand but a gentle request.  
Lensha regarded her a long moment. “Not yet,” she said. “There are things you must see first.”  
“And then will you trust me?”  
“No,” Lensha said. “But perhaps I will answer you. If you listen.”


	26. And all have gone to sea in the wind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #26: Slosh**  
Odette de Dzemael/Carvallain de Gorgagne.  
[[Title](http://www.poemswithoutfrontiers.org/Les_Roses_de_Saadi.html)]
> 
> M/F.

They were two days out of sight of land before Odette dared say anything to him. He had been avoiding her, doggedly, and her twin reported similar treatment. But Odette had espied him on the quarterdeck, bracketed by the twin shrines there to Llymlaen and Halone. They were underway, and the crew shouted back and forth to one another across the deck. This far from shore there were few birds, so that call-and-response was the only song she had heard all day. Carvallain—_Captain_ Carvallain de Gorgagne—walked the deck, pleased to observe in idleness.

Were they in private, Odette might have greeted him another way, but to do so now seemed a poor gambit. “Captain,” she said.  
He gave an overly theatrical bow. “Lady Odette,” he replied. There was contempt in the words, and worn nakedly on his face; he had quite thoroughly unlearned the graces of court that demanded of her a subtler tongue.  
“May I come up?” she asked, gesturing to the gangway before her.  
“Use that one,” Carvallain said, gesturing across the deck to the port side.  
Odette knew a snub when she was dealt one, even in a context so unfamiliar as the customs of a ship. “Very well,” she said, and crossed the deck to mount the stairs.

Carvallain had turned away then to put his face into the wind, and Odette drew abreast of him. The _Misery_ left a broad wake with its passing, and even up here she could hear the waves spanking the side of the ship as they traversed some current.

“So,” he said, not deigning to look at her. “What is it.” His tone was blunt, no better pleased than it had been when she was yalms away. Indeed, he seemed annoyed by her presence.  
Odette glanced back, sweeping her eyes over the deck. When she was certain there was no one in earshot, she said, “I’ve had a word with Tataru.”  
“A bit more than that, I should say,” he said, scoffing.  
“Ten years we kept your secret. Do you really think we would give you up so readily?”  
“I don’t know, _my lady__,_” he said. “The answer seems self-evident.”  
Odette sighed. “Whatever she knows, she gleaned at the Forgotten Knight. I swear it on my honor as—”  
“As a knight of Ishgard?” He laughed.  
“As an exile,” she said. “As I was when we chanced to meet again.”  
“Ah, but you are restored to the rook and spears,” he said, “while I shall never again hearken to the bell. Unless, of course, you were to drag me home. Perhaps you thought you would be a countess?”  
Her laughter resounded across the deck, louder than the sloshing churn of water below. It was true that Cesaire had been her favorite of all the Durendaire cousins, and truer still that her mother had hoped to arrange matters such that he would be wed to Odette. But they had been children—she had just begun her training with the sword and he his apprenticeship as an astrologian—when he had disappeared.

Or, as it turned out, had run away. Odette shook her head. “Carvallain,” she said, stressing the use of that name rather than the one he was born to. “If I wished to be a lord’s wife, I would have let Lord Speaker Aymeric de Borel press his suit on any of the hundred occasions he had to offer his hand.”  
“Why refuse him?” Carvallain wondered. There was a note of curiosity in his voice—he was warming to her, Odette surmised.  
Men were not so difficult to figure out. Easier still, afterward, to ply. It helped that they _did_ have certain commonalities of experience. “I would not be good for that office, nor it for me, having found little happiness at the Dzemael manse. I expect I would have received no better welcome among House Durendaire. Better to ask me to be your pirate queen.”  
He laughed. “And would you be?”  
Odette laughed with him. “No,” she said. “I would never be welcome in Limsa Lominsa again; Captain Rhoswen would kill me as soon as look at me.”  
Carvallain shook his head. “You are twice the swordswoman she is,” he pointed out.  
“Well,” Odette said. “It is a long voyage, so perhaps I will sample the lifestyle.

“Do you believe me yet?” she wondered, plying him with a gentle smile.  
“Forgive me my doubts, my lady,” he said, and turned toward her to offer up his hand.  
She appeared to consider the gesture a moment, and then placed her hand in his. “Only if you never occasion to doubt me again,” she said.  
He looked up into her pouting face and nodded. “I do so swear,” he said, bowing his head and lifting her hand to kiss her knuckles. He had not lost all of his courtly graces, nor indeed all of his charms. “Allow me to invite you—and your sister, of course—to dine at my table tonight.”  
She favored him with a smile then, inclining her head. “But that is a courtesy,” she said, “and not an apology.”  
He laughed, still clinging tight to her hand. “I will make plain my contrition,” Carvallain promised. “Perhaps, too, I will show you that a swan’s place is on the waters.”  
Odette’s smile twitched upward in satisfaction. “Perhaps,” she said. “I will tell my sister to make ready for dinner, then.” She withdrew her hand at last.

The bow he gave her then was far more sincere than the one he greeted her with, and he indicated with a sweep of his hand the starboard gangway, so she knew she had succeeded in winning her way back into his favor. That put a spring in her step as she descended to the main deck, and proceeded onward below.


	27. The easy shadow of night is softly laid

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #27: Palaver**  
Emet-Selch/Caelina Valeria.  
[[Title](https://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/pushkin/remembrance.html)]
> 
> M/F.  


It was late afternoon when they crested the bluff, and the Scions went in search of somewhere to make camp. It would be another half-day’s hike back to Fort Jobb, and a bit further to the Crystarium, but a night under the stars they’d won didn’t sound half-bad.

At least, not to most of their party.

Emet-Selch had complained most of the day, keeping up a plaintive, cajoling palaver. Their true objective was elsewhere laid, he insisted. Perhaps in the deepest thickets of Rak’tika, he had said. Caelina had the sneaking suspicion he was simply happier beneath the dim of the canopy.

Still, the tyranny of light had been broken over Lakeland, and as sunset stained the horizon, Caelina traced the flight paths of returning amaro, dark blots against a brilliant sky. She heard the rustling of cloth behind her, but did not turn her head.

“But say the word,” the Ascian greeted her, “and we could be elsewhere.”  
“Are you really so keen to return to the Crystarium?” she wondered.  
“Not at all,” Emet-Selch said. “If I am to be honest with you, as we _did_ so pledge, to see the Crystal Tower on the skyline here is galling. But the accommodations are comfortable.”  
Caelina laughed. “Could it be that Your Radiance longs for the comfort of a feather bed?” She turned her head to look at him, her amusement disrupting his pouty moue. “I seem to recall that the rootbeds of the Greatwood were sufficient to your needs not so long ago.”  
“Simply because I can sleep anywhere does not mean I have no preferences of my own.” He glanced down, away from her, to tug at the hems of his gloves. “You will not come away with me, then?” he said.  
“Why are you so eager to be shut of this place?”  
“Forgive me, but after the welcome I received from your friends upon our introduction before the Tower, I am not entirely at ease among them.”  
Caelina sighed. “Do you think those relations would improve if you spirited me away?”  
Emet-Selch regarded her a moment, a rueful smile playing upon his dark lips. “They do keep you on a tight leash, don’t they, hero.”  
“_I_ have the auracite,” she said softly. “Whether that is a comfort to you I could not say, but they can do you no permanent ill without it.”  
“And you are committed, then, to our allyship?”  
“If that is what you are content to call this,” Caelina told him.

He lifted his hand from his side, index finger drawn upward, the other digits curled at rest. It was a gesture she had seen half a hundred times in dreams, but the gentle touch that should have followed never came. Caelina examined the yearning in her breast, and found it was not all inherited.

Stars pricked the horizon in the east, and Caelina stared at them rather than dare regard the man beside her. “You know,” she said after a moment, “I think this is the first moment of calm you haven’t needed to fill with words today. Are you so afraid of silence?”  
His answer was the sound of insects and night birds upon the air. At length, he said, “Yes. But I kept my tongue yesterday.”  
“I noticed,” she said. “It seemed like you were trying to make up for lost time after that.”  
“Perhaps I am,” Emet-Selch murmured. His tone was subdued, and when she turned to regard him, his expression was distant. “Yesterday was the anniversary of Aquila’s death.”  
Caelina’s brow knitted. “What day is it today, then?”  
“Ante diem quartum Nonas Septembris,” he replied.  
It was strangely comforting to hear the date given in Garlean—perhaps because it was only Nero who still bothered to count by that calendar. She blinked, coming to a realization: “It’s my nameday,” she said.  
“I know,” he said. “I suppose I was waiting for your friends to notice.”  
“I think they’ve grown too accustomed to the elven calendar here.” Caelina lifted her shoulders. “Besides, I’m in poor practice asking for gifts.”  
“I will grant you one anyway,” Emet-Selch said, “if you will but sit out under the stars with me.”  
Caelina tilted her head. “Very well,” she replied. “What did you have in mind?”  
“Merely a story,” he said. “Yours by right.”

She nodded once, though her mind was elsewhere a moment. Her throat bobbed with the effort of swallowing, and she turned toward him. “I am happy to listen,” she said. “But first I would have something better done in silence.”  
Those gold eyes fixed upon her, one delicate brow arched upward in prompting. “Oh?” he said.  
Caelina lifted her chin, though it never came down in the nod he might have expected. Instead she lingered there, leaning upward, their breath commingling in the cooling air. Then she pressed her lips to his, and found them warm and pliant. Something tingled against her skin as they kissed, and Emet-Selch put his arms around her, his gloved hands coming to the small of her back.

The night deepened, and for a short while longer, silence reigned.


	28. My needle to your north abruptly swerved

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #28:Attune**  
X'shasi Kilntreader/Baro Llyonesse.  
[[Title](https://everydaymillay.blogspot.com/2011/03/fatal-interview-sonnet-iii-no-lack-of.html)]
> 
> M/F.  


X’shasi is no scholar, unlearned in matters of aether but for the practical knowledge she’s gleaned. To attune to an aetheryte, though, feels like exchanging some small piece of herself with the crystal. She has strung crumbs of her being across two worlds, aethertrails like tethers leading her back to wherever she cares to go.

There is a small one in his garden, and she casts herself back to it perhaps more often than any other place—certainly more often than her own home, of late. A piece of her belongs in Ul’dah; another in Ishgard, and Amaurot. And here, perhaps.


	29. To live again, undying! Aye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #29: Deleterious**  
Fray Myste  
[[Title](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55035/last-hope)]
> 
> Gen.  
Major character death.

This can’t be how this ends. They need me. They _need_ me! If I’d just had my staff … if I’d just moved quicker, I wouldn’t be dying, pathetic, in the mud. I can hear nothing but the roaring in my ears. Blood on my hands, like rushing water.

I am carried away. But I suppose I always am getting carried away. And that makes me carrion. The crows won’t be long; I’ve seen it often enough.

And there’s mine, bright eyed and curious, blazing like a candle. I’m too far gone for warmth now. I want to live; I need—


	30. And You're afar—but are you real there?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Prompt #30: Darkness**  
Zenos yae Galvus & Estinien Wyrmblood.  
[[Title](https://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/blok/i_seek_salvation.html)]
> 
> Gen.  


The sun never rises on the Ghimlyt Pass. Even were it not for the aetheric conditions, the mountains that rise to either side would ensure the fact. Zenos comes to it now not in the garb of the Resistance, but with nothing to mark his allegiance save the Sharlayan-styled eye that the Scions of the Seventh Dawn had adopted for their insignia, pinned upon the breast of his tunic. He will discard it on the way from the camp, but he will not depart alone.

Indeed, another figure, similarly clad in darkness, waits at the trailhead. He wears a hood, but it does not entirely disguise the spill of his moon-white hair. The man turns at the sound of footsteps, but does not yet reach for the lance slung across his back.

“Stock well the quiver with arrows bright,” says he.  
“The bowman feared need never fight,” Zenos replies. “Dragonslayer Estinien—we meet again.”  
The dragoon looks him over, sizing him up. There is no recognition there. “Do I know you?” he says.  
“Perhaps you would know me better with a gryphon-winged hood,” Zenos replies. “It was I, after all, who fought the Ascian to a standstill while you made good your escape.” He reaches up, plucking the insignia from his tunic, and pulls a thread that begins its unraveling.  
“I recall the incident,” Estinien says, “but have no name to put to the face.”  
The man is a poor liar, and Zenos is annoyed by it. “You may call me Julien de Vedastus,” he says.  
Estinien grunts. “Not a lot of Elezen in the Ala Mhigan Resistance,” he notes.  
Zenos looks down at the knots of thread in his hand. “Think of me as a volunteer,” he replies.  
The dragoon watches Zenos shred his badge. His doubt is palpable.  
“It will be more useful,” Zenos says, “to call me Julien _oen_ Vedastus, where we are going.”  
“You are familiar with the Empire.”  
Zenos has no amusement to offer this man. He stretches the skeins of thread between his hands, and pulls them until they fray and snap. “Intimately. I am surprised you were chosen for this mission.”

Estinien turns away, setting out upon the trail. “I was _conscripted_ for this mission,” he said. “Such a custom should be familiar to you, Your Imperial Highness.”  
“If you knew me,” Zenos says, feeling an itch in his fingers, “why pretend otherwise?”  
“To gauge your honesty,” Estinien says. “You failed.”  
“Forgive me, Ser Estinien,” Zenos replies, false piety thick on his tongue. “The eikon-slayer and I had agreed it was best I not grant this information to anyone Frumentarium was likely to torture it out of.”  
Estinien grunts. “The Scions thought it best I knew what I was dealing with. You have an agenda in returning to the Empire, and I trust her judgment in most things. Not this.”  
“My body awaits me, worn by a shadowless fiend. The Scions want the lie put to the stories surrounding ‘me,’ and I want to be made whole.”  
“Not much sport in it for you,” Estinien says.  
“I was given to understand that the most effective way to destroy an Ascian required someone with the Echo. The Scions can spare few champions for that cause, and I am best poised to execute it. At the end of this road lies the only person on this star—_she_ being elsewhere—who can offer me anything like a challenge.”  
“Try me sometime,” Estinien suggests. “Little point in me acting as your keeper if I’m as outmatched as you say.”  
“We will see, Azure Dragoon.”


	31. Index

**[1\. My heart, being hungry](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48618578) ("Voracious")**

X'shasi Kilntreader (a miqo'te Warrior of Light) & X'moru Tia (a miqo'te adventurer) × "My heart, being hungry, feeds on food" by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

**[2\. With greater wit, or better, wealth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48669824) ("Bargain")**

Caelina Valeria (a Garlean Warrior of Light) ♦ Nero Scaeva × "The Bronze Cavalier" by Alexander Pushkin 

**[3\. Why should you worship her? Her you surpass](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48676547) ("Lost")**

Emet-Selch & Warrior of Light; Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light × "Hero and Leander" by Christopher Marlowe  
An AU where the Fourteenth Councilmember's shade was found upon a reflection and uplifted to their previous station, as befits an Ascian. 

**[4\. And to knock at my heart is to beat on my grave](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48710825) ("Shifting Blame")**

Fray Myste/Odette de Dzemael (an elezen Warrior of Light) × "Parted" by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore 

**[5\. A Fear that in the deep night starts awake](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48746030) ("Vault")**

X'shasi Kilntreader/Baro Llyonesse (a legacy-only miqo'te Warrior of Light); past X'shasi Kilntreader/Haurchefant Greystone × "Interim" by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

**[6\. Go, therefore, like the eye of an angel to awaken his courage](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48811406) ("First Steps")**

Odette de Dzemael & Colette de Dzemael (an elezen Warrior of Light; Odette's younger twin); Aymeric de Borel/Odette de Dzemael × "The Water Flower" by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore  
CW: body shaming; fatphobia; narcissistic mothers. 

**[7\. returned, to your place of dreaming](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48811952) ("Forgiven")**

Aris Greensorrow (a viera adventurer) × "Dear Dja Baby Boori" by Lisa Bellear 

**[8\. To lay down their reckless heads](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48856130) ("Rencounter"; a free-prompt day)**

Zenos yae Galvus × "Twelve" by Aleksandr Blok  
"Shasi sas Intemperatus," an AU where by necessity X'shasi joins forces with Gaius van Baelsar to defeat Lahabrea and is declared Viceroy of Eorzea. 

**[9\. Daisies spring from damnèd seeds](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48879266) ("Hesitate")**

X'shasi Kilntreader ♦ Urianger Augurelt × "Weeds" by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

**[10\. Now flooded with moonlight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48922415) ("Foster")**

Gaius van Baelsar/Midas nan Garlond × "Who is Happy in Russia?" by Nikolai Nekrasov 

**[11\. I breathed my soul back into me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48951959) ("Snuff")**

X'shasi Kilntreader/V'jaela Firebird (an Echo-blessed miqo'te adventurer) × "Renascence" by Edna St. Vincent Millay  
CW: Drug use; breath play; adult content. 

**[12\. And not in vain you’ve sent me light](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48958964) ("Fingers Crossed")**

Caelina Valeria ♦ Nero Scaeva × "Angel" by Alexander Pushkin 

**[13\. We shall die apart, shall we not? That is what you wanted!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/48999089) ("Wax")**

Odette de Dzemael & Colette de Dzemael; past Fray Myste/Odette de Dzemael × "Elegy (You, who have taken all)" by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore 

**[14\. Who will measure Uffern?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49047653) ("Scour")**

Melloria Hathaar (a miqo'te Warrior of Light) × "The First Address of Taliesin" by Taliesin the bard 

**[15\. To be flame in the heat](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49078898) ("Travail"; a free-prompt day)**

Sidurgu Orl/Warrior of Light × "It's an Honour to be Human" by L. Khuushaan  
A roleswap AU where Fray lives and Sid dies, becoming the player's Dark Knight mentor. 

**[16\. And find me at dawn in a desolate place](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49110950) ("Jitter")**

X'shasi Kilntreader & Regula van Hydrus × "Departure" by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

**[17\. Brought to earth the arrogant brow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49142336) ("Obeisant")**

X'shasi Silverhair (an Echo-blessed miqo'te adventurer who is not yet the Warrior of Light) × "Dirge" by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

**[18\. You're gone away, and I'm in desert](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49169867) ("Wilt")**

X'shasi Kilntreader/Zenos yae Galvus × "You're Gone Away" by Aleksandr Blok 

**[19\. And we will all the pleasures prove](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49202615) ("Radiant")**

"Solus zos Galvus"/Aquila jen Novius (a Garlean engineer who will later incarnate as Caelina Valeria) × "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe 

**[20\. Thy mark is on me! I am not the same](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49233305) ("Bisect")**

X'shasi Kilntreader × "The Suicide" by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

**[21\. Your other sister and my other soul](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49265366) ("Crunch")**

X'shasi Kilntreader & "Minfilia" (Ryne Waters) × "Ode to Silence" by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

**[22\. This red gown will make a shroud](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49523570) ("Detritus"; a free-prompt day)**

X'shasi Kilntreader & Fray Myste × "The Shroud" by Edna St. Vincent Millay  
An AU where the mysterious voice heard beginning in "Prelude in Violet" belongs to a different benefactor: one who allows the Warrior of Light to rewrite history. 

**[23\. And where her glances fall, there cities burn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49334459) ("Parched")**

Menelaus (an Ancient and member of the Convocation of Fourteen who will one day incarnate as X'shasi Kilntreader) × "Helen" by Euripedes 

**[24\. A look all veiled in blue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49342967) ("Unctuous")**

Aymeric de Borel/Odette de Dzemael × "Flower of Childhood" by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore 

**[25\. I knew her for a little ghost](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49393250) ("Trust")**

X'shasi Kilntreader & Lensha Hathaar (a legacy miqo'te Warrior of Light from a timeline where she failed in her duties) × "The Little Ghost" by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

**[26\. And all have gone to sea in the wind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49421003) ("Slosh")**

Carvallain de Gorgagne/Odette de Dzemael × "The Roses of Saadi" by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore 

**[27\. The easy shadow of night is softly laid](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49453499) ("Palaver")**

Emet-Selch/Caelina Valeria × "Remembrance" by Alexander Pushkin 

**[28\. My needle to your north abruptly swerved](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49489298) ("Attune")**

X'shasi Kilntreader/Baro Llyonesse × "Sonnet III (No lack of counsel)" by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

**[29\. To live again, undying! Aye](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49525355) ("Deleterious"; a free-prompt day)**

Fray Myste × "Last Hope" by Paul Verlaine  
Archive Warning: Major character death. 

**[30\. And You're afar—but are you real there?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20488460/chapters/49532786) ("Darkness")**

Zenos yae Galvus & Estinien Wyrmblood × "I seek salvation" by Aleksandr Blok 


End file.
